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TEXT K
First read the questions.
39. The Agency for International Development is a ___ organization.
A. new
B. regional
C. UN
D. US
40. According to NDS’s statistics, the number of babies the average Pilipino woman bears dropped by ___ between 1960 and 1993.
A.4.1
B.6.4
C.2.3
D.2.9
Now go through TEXT K quickly to answer questions 39 and 40.
When representatives from 170 nations gather in Cairo next month for the third International Conference on Population and Development, they will vote on the largest population-control plan in history. It is ambitious. Not only does it call for a host of “reproductive fights” and aim to freeze world population at 7 2 billion people by 2050; it also calls for billions of dollars in new government spending on the issue-US $ 13.2 billion by the end of the century.
Some of the plan’s provisions have already aroused opposition, most notably from Pope John Paul II. All this has been gleefully covered by the newspapers. Yet scant attention has been paid to many of the dubious social and economic assumptions that underlie the plan. In particular, it is interesting to see how the se programmes are being sold in places like the Philippines, on the front lines of the population debate. For the way the proponents of population control have gone about pushing their programmes raises serious doubts about the integrity of their studies, their ultimate value to development, and the role of foreign-aid groups.
Although population-control measures in the Philippines never reached the coercive levels they did in India, they were not popular. This time, proponents have learned their lesson. For the past few years, they have been quietly laying the groundwork for Cairo. Rather than attack the issue head-on, it has been redefined in terms of a host of new "reproductive rights” to which the solution is invariably a government-funded initiative.
We have just had a good taste of this in the Philippines. The National Statistics Office recently published the results of the 1993 National Demographic Survey (NDS),which happens to have been funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. It is probably mere coincidence, but the NDS report, published on the eve of the Cairo meeting, nicely supports the thrust of the Cairo Declaration. That is, it has found a connection between mothers’ and children’s health and fertility behaviour. The implication is that large-scale government family-planning programmes are essential if health issues are to be addressed.
But the demographic survey seems to have been selective about what facts it would report and connections it would make. Take the health issue. The document concludes that the high risk of infant, child and maternal mortality is associated with pregnancies where mothers are too young, too old, or have already had several children. But a discussion of poverty is missing from the list of factor s related to health. It would be difficult to deny that poverty, lack of access to safe water, poor housing, poor hygiene and unsanitary conditions all have a strong bearing on the health of the mother and child. Although the NDS collected data on housing characteristics, it did not include any data on income.
A closer look at the fertility behaviour of the poor is important because of the extensive literature on the “replacement effect” of high infant mortality. Statistical studies in various countries show high fertility among the poor as a rational desire to have children who will survive into adulthood to help take care of them. This helps to explain why many poor women have babies at such short intervals. The 1993 NDS would have been a good opportunity to verify the validity of this behaviour in the Philippines.
The NDS avoided collecting data on socio-economic variables that would have a serious effect on these health issues. But, in one area, it made painstaking efforts to quantify fertility preference to derive figures for planned and unplanned pregnancies. It concluded that “if all unwanted births were avoided, the total fertility rate would be 2.9 children, which is almost 30% less than the observed rate.” This, too, was used to establish an “unmet” need requiring a government programme.
Yet the NDS’s own numbers suggest that Filipinos are aware of their option s. The total fertility rote——the number of babies the average woman bears over her lifetime——has dropped to 4.1 in 1993 from 6.4 in 1960. Some 61% used contraceptives, just a few percentage points short of the 65-80% rate prevailing in Europe, North America and most of East Asia. The delay of marriage by Filipinos t o the age of 23 years represents a reduction of the risk of pregnancy by 19% given the 35 years of their reproductive life.
In short, the Philippines has its problems but its people are not as ignorant as the population-control lobby would suppose. Unfortunately, this lobby has development dollars, organizational muscle and support of the media. “We’ve built a consensus about population as a global issue and family planning as a health issue,” says the UN’s Naris Sadik, host of the conference. Yes, they have. And now we know how.
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