To the Rich belongs the Choice

 January 3, 1989

To the Rich belongs the Choice

If the rich are different for you and me, it is because, on final reckoning, they can preach true freedom of choice, where the poor enjoy none.

When I first came upon Bea Zobel’s piece on freedom of choice, I must confess I made little of it. Unlike her, the subject of population growth and family planning little excites me. To each her light, to each his darkness.

Three kids were all my parents wanted. I prefer none but am happy enough to leave to others the task to multiply and crowd the planet whichever way they want.

In China, India, Bangladesh, and Armenia, there have been cataclysms aplenty to set the balance of nature aright. I believe in a higher providence at once merciful and cruel but always wise. I go by that unseen hand that writes our fate with crooked lines.

But the good lady protests a wee bit much. Day after day these past two weeks, I have seen the papers heralding her courage and compassion. I do not know the purpose of such persistence, but I have a rather clear notion of how it thrives, and I do not like it.

If Mrs. Zobel could have her way, she would leave to each and every creature the right to choose the brand or method of birth control she or he prefers. She is for total freedom of conscience in such matters, and so are most of us.

But three things I think need reminding her and ourselves on that account. First, neither science nor conscience is infallible. Second, having embraced our brand of faith, we are bound by it. And third, the poor really have very little choice.

Forty years ago the atom was power in our hands. Today we fret about the threat of holocaust from thousands of nuclear warheads as from hundreds of Long Miles and Chernobyls whose awesome capacity for annihilation we are impotent to contain.

Twenty years ago hitherto our savants worried that we were peopling the globe to extinction. Of late alarm has been raised that we are achieving that extinction, not through overpopulation alone, but through greying societies whose creative energies are sapped by selfishness and over-indulgence.

I assume even Mrs. Zobel would cringe from outright foetal murder, so let us not belabour that method, even if, not unknown to her surely, it is now indiscriminately prescribed in various countries near. Let’s look at “caps” and pills instead, for about these we are less squeamish.

The growing legions of women whose reproductive apparata have been irreparably damaged by IUD’s in the United States has all but brought that contraception to a dismal finish.

And in Germany at least, where the tablet has been a fixture for two decades, the havoc it has wreaked on women’s hormonal constitution has led to its being made available to the end-user by prescription only.

So much for science’s wonders. So others have learned, and so we have not. For lo and behold, all the discards of more “civilized” nations have now become our bane. Outmoded, expired, unsafe, these “wonderful” gadgets are now being dumped on us, and we are reckless in gratitude.

Kawawa naman the poor. There are just too many of them. Let us cure their blights by lessening their numbers. In the process, we can also hold on to the status quo: our maids in uniform, our streets empty of beggars, our backlots rid of squatters, our groceries and shopping malls chockfull of imported wearables and comestibles.

After all, our perverted logic tells us, what ails us must also ail them. We would spare them the weight loss and diminished verve that comes from bearing five children. Tough luck. Would that the millions of others out there had the same luxury of unburdening themselves of such complaints before a paediatrician, a good Catholic, a fine human being.

For them life is a vastly rougher proposition, a perilous gamble. To afford to see a doctor as they must in their twilight, they must first ensure that three of their five offspring survive infancy, two get to school, and one finishes and lands a decent job.

Will less mean more? Supposing we got them around to having just one or two siblings instead. Can we guarantee them more food, more schools, and more opportunities for gainful employment thereby?

Can we promise them a government that is more conscientious and caring, and new breed of elite who are less wasteful and extravagant? Because if we only want less of them so there can be more of us, then all we have is a cop out.

Let the rich then privately salve their troubled souls all they want. The clarity and purity of their conscience being inversely proportional to their worldly stock, the eye of the needle is their lot.

The poor, at least in that regard, have an easier time of it. Harsher though life be for them, the mischief of God appears a better option than the avarice of fellow man. We should not begrudge their believing that his rules are fairer and his surprises kinder than our in the end.