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Posted on 07/16/2009 8:56:36 AM PDT by Pyro7480
Catholic villagers in Thua Thien-Hue province say they have tried their best to follow Church teaching on the use of artificial birth control methods in the face of the government's two-child policy.
Huong Toan villagers, just like Vietnamese elsewhere in the country, are required to have no more than two children per family since 1994, when village authorities launched a nationwide family planning program. Families with more than two children have to pay rice to the government as a fine.
Many local Catholics say they have done their best to remain true to Church teaching but some have had to resort to using contraceptives later on as they could not afford the hefty fines.
Catherine Pham Thi Thanh, 44, said that since 1996, she has been fined a total of 3,800 kilograms of rice for having six children.
Thanh, who produces rice alcohol and raises pigs to support her family, said she was fined 300 kilograms for her third child, 600 kilograms for the fourth, 900 kilograms for the fifth and 2,000 kilograms of rice for the sixth. Her children range from two to 15 years.
She pointed out that her family makes an annual profit of only 700 kilograms of rice from their 1,000 square-meter farmland the local government grants them....
Father Joseph Nguyen Van Chanh, Huong Toan parish priest, said 90 percent of his 1,200 parishioners have agreed to pay fines as a way to be faithful to Church teaching. Local Catholics are taught natural family planning methods during marriage preparation courses, he noted.
Some local Catholics said Father Chanh is asking for donations from benefactors to support local people with large families. Huong Toan village has about 14,000 people....
(Excerpt) Read more at ucanews.com ...
Catholic ping!
Yep, if Holdren, among others, has his way.
Thank Margeret Sanger...
For later.
The result of Zero’s policies will be to make having kids more and more uneconomicial. For example, Zero’s cap and trade, nationalization of the auto industry, CAFE etc will destroy the market for family cars/trucks. People will only be able to drive compacts and combined with the child seat requirements will make having more than 2 kids much more difficult.
We’ll beat them up. There are more of us.
“If Obama’s cronies have their way, this will be the practice here.”
Unless you are a minority.
We need more wise latinas, don’t you see? /s
You mean no more deductions for kids/dependents?
God bless our Mexican friends here in America who will guarantee that this never happens here. They will save us from the genocidal AlGorians.
If people don’t voluntarily stop having more children than they can feed, the government (in any country) will have no trouble getting the political support to implement this sort of program.
If Obama’s cronies have their way, this will be the practice here.
So I’ll have to send a box of Uncle Ben’s to the White House for each additional child? (or with Obama in office will that be cartons of Newports....)
To consider population increase as the primary cause of underdevelopment is mistaken, even from an economic point of view. Suffice it to consider, on the one hand, the significant reduction in infant mortality and the rise in average life expectancy found in economically developed countries, and on the other hand, the signs of crisis observable in societies that are registering an alarming decline in their birth rate....Morally responsible openness to life represents a rich social and economic resource. Populous nations have been able to emerge from poverty thanks not least to the size of their population and the talents of their people. On the other hand, formerly prosperous nations are presently passing through a phase of uncertainty and in some cases decline, precisely because of their falling birth rates; this has become a crucial problem for highly affluent societies. The decline in births, falling at times beneath the so-called “replacement level”, also puts a strain on social welfare systems, increases their cost, eats into savings and hence the financial resources needed for investment, reduces the availability of qualified labourers, and narrows the “brain pool” upon which nations can draw for their needs. Furthermore, smaller and at times miniscule families run the risk of impoverishing social relations, and failing to ensure effective forms of solidarity. These situations are symptomatic of scant confidence in the future and moral weariness. It is thus becoming a social and even economic necessity once more to hold up to future generations the beauty of marriage and the family, and the fact that these institutions correspond to the deepest needs and dignity of the person. In view of this, States are called to enact policies promoting the centrality and the integrity of the family founded on marriage between a man and a woman, the primary vital cell of society, and to assume responsibility for its economic and fiscal needs, while respecting its essentially relational character.
0 will end up planting the seeds for CW2.
I suspect white families will be punished for having too many kids. Minorities and illegals will be exempt.
I have my doubts about them targeting just whites. Heck, they implement this kind of nonsense against people in Third World countries, as I demonstrated here.
Numerical increase in population has little to do with economic development. But population increase that outstrips a society’s ability to feed and educate itself is most certainly the leading cause of economic underdevelopment. It’s also the leading cause of the emergence of tyrannical and totalitarian governments, as hordes of desperate people are eager to believe anyone promising to make their lives even marginally better, and can’t afford to think about principles or about the long term, because they don’t know how they’re going to eat or feed their children tomorrow. When you’ve got a population that’s overwhelmingly illiterate and they’re averaging 4-5 children apiece, obviously there’s no way even a bare majority of the next generation are going to learn to read.
Naw... Muslims won’t allow it.
I’m surprised the Vietnamese Gov’t fines them, I’d have thought they would just round up the Catholics and shoot them and their kids.
I’d buy a school bus before I gave up on having a bunch of kids.
It’s tyranny, plain and simple.
Incorporate yourself as a school, and then you can buy a school bus and run it, exempt from the majority of rules that affect private auto owners. You’ll have to stop at railroad tracks, though.
We named our school. I want to plaster it on the side of the bus. :0) I don’t mind stopping at railroad tracks. Most of the tracks we go over are exempt, anyway. I never thought about incorporating ourselves as a school. Not a bad idea!
IF an issue should arise about buying large vehicles, you’d just have to follow your state’s private school statutes to make yourself eligible to run a “school bus.” Maybe even make some money off it!
First, there's no suggestion whatsoever that these mothers and fathers are having more children than they can feed.
Second, their government is not acting to make sure that the parests have enough resources to raise their children, but exactly the opposite: they're forcefully removing the resources necessary for the care and nurture of the children. (You did notice, didn't you, that over the past 13 years, the governmet fined Catherine Pham Thi Thanh the equivalent of 5 1/2 years of income? They are not insuring, but destroying, her ability to feed her children.)
Third, the article repeatedly emphasizes that Catherine and her neighbors are striving to live according tothe teachings of the Catholic Church. The Church neither requires nor encourages people to have more children than they can care for.
If you will re-read the article, you will see that it's the Catholic Church which is teaching people to support their own children, and to plan their families accordingly, and the government which is coercively preventing them from doing so.
Not necessarily these specific people, but in the country as a whole. That's the ONLY reason any government implements coercive population control measures. If the population is growing fast while being self-sufficient and productive, it's beneficial to a totalitarian government to keep it growing -- more economic power, more bodies to staff the military and police. In Soviet-era Romania, when people stopped reproducing because they were so miserable, the communist government implemented coercive population *increase* measures -- people were thrown out of their homes and lost their jobs if they didn't produce babies. Women were forced to undergo gynecological exams to see if there was some reason they weren't getting pregnant -- if they were discovered to have been using contraceptives, the home and job were history. If they were found to have blocked tubes or some such treatable fertility problem, they were forced to undergo treatment for it whether they wanted to or not.
My point was that it's important to promote a culture in which people don't think it's okay to just keep popping out babies, regardless of ability to support them, because this inevitably leads to political support for coercive government population control programs. Those programs are then administered by the government on its own terms, and even people who are able to support more children end up being subjected to the population control measures.
I will grant you your doubts, but I have my views too. I hope we are both wrong.
Your premise is flatly wrong. Among other things, governments implement coercive population control measures to cut down on populations they consider "undesirable," precisely as Ruth Bader Ginsburg admitted and Margaret Sanger promoted.
It's a sanitized, publicly acceptable form of genocide.
Not so. First of all, each family is in the best position to decide whether it has enough food for enough children. If each family has the freedom and the means to make that determination, then all of them will have the means to choose their family size, and the means to support their kids.
Secondly, governments have other reasons for coercively limiting childbearing: the usual reason is not hunger, but the numerical limitation of a socially or politically disfavored subgroup.
If the population is growing fast while being self-sufficient and productive, it's beneficial to a totalitarian government to keep it growing -- more economic power, more bodies to staff the military and police. In Soviet-era Romania, when people stopped reproducing because they were so miserable, the communist government implemented coercive population *increase* measures...
Thanks, you just made another good point for my argument: government do not have to coerce miserable, starving people into limiting their childbearing.
" -- people were thrown out of their homes and lost their jobs if they didn't produce babies. Women were forced to undergo gynecological exams to see if there was some reason they weren't getting pregnant -- if they were discovered to have been using contraceptives, the home and job were history. If they were found to have blocked tubes or some such treatable fertility problem, they were forced to undergo treatment for it whether they wanted to or not. "
More evils of coercive government family planning. No argument from me there.
"My point was that it's important to promote a culture in which people don't think it's okay to just keep popping out babies, regardless of ability to support them."
This is a rather stupid sereotype. If people have the liberty to self-manage both their productive and their reproductive activities, self-interest will strongly incline them to have the number of children they desire and can care for.
This is a strong point in favor of liberty, not government coercion, whether pro-natalist or anti-natalist.
All homeowners who refuse to send their children to the government indoctrination centers (pubic schools) are de facto “fined” the (ALMOST ALWAYS LOWER PER PUPIL) cost of tuition or home schooling for their children.
And the more children in a family, the larger the “fine”.
Strangely, this is the exact inverse of the increased “benefit” a homeowner with a large family receives by sending all of his kids to pubic school.
Given the negative economic consequences for society when birthrates are below replacement (Europe is ther, and we are almost there), taxpaying families should be given huge tax breaks for having more children.
I need to do a little research!
I haven’t looked into the details, myself. We have a card from the “Division of Non-Public Education” recognizing us as a school, but I don’t know if more would be necessary to operate a school bus.
If we put our school name on the van, the homeowners’ association would probably decide it’s a commercial vehicle and fine us for parking it in the driveway!
Pro-Life bump
The Communist government of Vietnam was not put into power by the demands of families with more children than they could support. Like all other Communist governments, it was put into place by a small group of power-mad ideologues with absolutely no interest in the welfare of the general population.
With all the millions that Communist government kill directly or indirectly - in planned famines, for example - do they really “need” coerced birth control for the “welfare” of the people? The logic of that is weak, to put it generously.
Reality check: We have a huge and growing segment of the population here in the US that continues to pop out babies that they have no means or intention of supporting. That's why my NYC apartment is surrounded by massive public housing towers, filled with people who can't pay their own rent, can't pay for their own food, and can't pay for their own basic medical care, and keep popping out babies anyway. Then they use the babies as hostages to extract ever larger amounts of money from the productive segment of the population. This is unsustainable, and if we let it continue, you can be sure that eventually coercive population control measures will happen in the US.
In many third world countries, parents who are suffering from malnutrition themselves, and have already had some children die of malnutrition and still have others who are in imminent danger of dying of malnutrition, keep right on having more babies anyway. In quite a few countries, selling children when they're 7/8/9 years old is a common solution for these families. They get $50-$100 bucks for a pretty little 8 year old girl sold to a brothel, where she will chained to a bed and be raped dozens of times a day. Little boys are sometimes sold into sexual slavery as well, though more often they're sold into other types of labor slavery. Most will never see their families again. And the families can't even afford to care.
In India, there is a common phenomenon of dumping elderly members of a household when there's not enough food to keep feeding them and the ever-growing number of children. Literally dumping, on roadsides, under bridges, on the outskirts of cities. There are charity groups that try to pick up as many of these dumped people as they can, and scrape together a little food and medicine for them. But there are way too many for the financially strapped charity groups to handle, and a lot just die where they were dumped. Sorry grandpa, now that our seventh baby has arrived we're going to have to dump you. Really. This is happening right now.
No, people do not just naturally limit their child-bearing to the number they can afford to support. Well-educated people generally do. Illiterate people who grew up in illiterate homes generally don't.
Secondly, governments have other reasons for coercively limiting childbearing: the usual reason is not hunger, but the numerical limitation of a socially or politically disfavored subgroup.
That's a completely separate issue (and much less common) from the sort of coercive population control that's going on in VietNam and China. These are across the board programs -- not limited to people with specific religious beliefs, or specific political beliefs, or specific ethnicity. The government knows the only way that it can even marginally improve the statndard of living is by drastically reducing population growth. And the sad thing is, it works. The standard of living in China has improved dramatically in the decades since the strict and extremely coercive population control program began. Literacy is way up, lifespan is way up, everything is way up. And interestingly, the side effect of *reaching* this higher standard of living, is that a politically significant number of Chinese citizens can now afford to think about things like freedom and do something about, with the result that capitalism is emerging and organized opposition to specific government activities is emerging. And there is very little opposition to the population control progran.
It's really sad that people don't just self-limit their child-bearing. It even sadder that "conservatives" are incessantly insisting there's no reason for anyone to limit their child-bearing. Just get a marriage license from the government, and start popping them out. Let God worry about how they'll get fed. Only somehow it always ends up that either they just don't get fed (the norm in third world countries) or other people who are productive and do limit their child-bearing get forced by government to pay to support all these other people's children (the norm in developed countries).
You don’t get it. This woman can’t afford to hire employees. Farming was a family business because all the kids were needed for the work. More kids doesn’t mean a family can’t feed itself. It makes them MORE self-sufficient, not less and that’s what the govt won’t tolerate.
Don’t mistake the welfare mother surrounded by children with hard working large families. It’s not the size of the family that’s the problem, it’s the govt.
Second, people who are paid bonuses by the goverment to "pop out babies" will probably continue to do so. But not one person on this forum --- and certainly not I --- would defend that proposition. Straw-man argument: attacking a position which is not in fact the position of the person you're arguing with.
"It even sadder that "conservatives" are incessantly insisting there's no reason for anyone to limit their child-bearing.'
Another straw-man argument. Neither I not anybody else at FreeRepublic that I know of (and I've been here for 11 years) has ever said such a thing. Let alone somebody "incessantly insisting" upon this. Would you like to provide a link to back up your claim? Or are you quite mistaken?
Crowded third world countries don’t have an endless supply of new farmland for ever-growing families. If a family has 5 acres of farmland when they have one child, they still have 5 acres of farmland when they have eight, and there’s no way for the additional children to make the tiny plot produce more food. They have no money to buy more, because it’s scarce and expensive, and they’ve been spending every dime they make just to feed themselves. What worked for large families in the sparesly populated early United States — just moving West and taking over more land to farm — is not an option in most of the world (just like it’s no longer an option here).
VietNam is a society in which the vast majority of the population is barely making enough food or money to feed and shelter themselves. Things have improved substantially over the past couple of decades, but this has coincided with drastic and oppressive population control measures. Per capita income is still less than $1000 a year.
I’m not advocating the oppressive tactics. But I recognize that if people don’t limit child-bearing voluntarily, governments will end up doing it for them involuntarily. The best way to counter such governmental abuses is to vigorously promote responsible self-limitation on child-bearing, and that’s what is sorely lacking in conservative discourse.
You need look no further than the post immediately preceding your own, for an example of the typical FR argument re poverty and fertility, repeating the usual theme of “having more babies will make them better off economically”. Can’t afford to hire employees to generate profits for you? Just breed some that you can make work for you without pay!
In any case, that's for Catherine Pham Thi Thanh and her husband to decide. They are the only ones who can make this judgment of how many children they want and need.
The point must be reiterated: the people in this article are productive, they and their children; and the government --- not the babies, the government --- is reducing them to penury.
On the family level--- according to the article--- they have the means to space, delay, or even prevent more childbearing already, via NFP: the only method of family-planning which requies no daily, monthly or yarly supplies, makes no demands on the public health infreastructure, and costs nothing (beyond the initial investment of learning the method); which has no expensive or dangerous side-effects; which requires the equal and intelligent commitment of both the husband and the wife; and which cannot be used coercively by the state.
If they have the liberty to manage both their production and their reproduction, the interference of the state has nothing to do with the common good and everything to do with tyranny.
The reality is that many of these countries are filled with families who have many children and can’t afford to feed and shelter them. These children end up providing cheap human capital for terrorist groups, tyrannical political groups, and slave labor (including sexual slavery). If there were opportunities for these children to be productive in a self-sufficient household, their parents wouldn’t be selling them to them slave traders and brothel owners, or shipping them off to terror-promoting madrassahs which provide the only opportunity for the children to learn to read. These people have no clue about “good management of land and labor” — they’re uneducated and many are illiterate (although a huge boost in the literacy rate has been one of the achievement of the Vietnamese government (as has also been the case in China). And no amount of good management can extract more than a certain amount of food from a few acres of land — they have no money to buy machinery, or high quality fertilizer and seed. And one ill-timed flood or drought can (and often does) wipe out an entire year’s production — more people in the family can’t change that harsh fact.
GS, It's not a matter of extracting more than a certain amount of "food" --- it's a matter of producing the honorable reward known as "profit." Small producers can produce more proft from (say) 200 lbs of flower seeds marketed in 1/2 oz. packets, than they can from several tons of beans; or more from tiny organic blueberries marketed to the hotels and restaurants, than for bulk rice; more for an acre of potted ornamentals than for an acre of Christmas trees; or more for... the specifics will vary, but you get the picture.
The optimal use of a little bit of land is something each producer will have to decide upon, based on their own capactiy to invest, to manage, to produce and to market. These decisions --- I'll bet you'll agree --- should be made by the producers, and not by some Government Planning and Commanding Commission ---
... and the same goes for the decisions of how many children to have, and when, and by whom.
"One ill-timed flood or drought can (and often does) wipe out an entire year’s production — more people in the family can’t change that harsh fact."
Less people in the family can't change that harsh fact, either.
The bottom line is, I'm not deciding for Mrs. Catherine Pham Thi Thanh what she's going to grow on her land or how many children shall be born from her womb. That's her chosen burden, her chosen opportunity, her chosen investment of time and energy, and/or her chosen wealth: hers and her husband's.
Th point is so simple one would think any lover of human liberty would cotton on to it. I'm done. Good night.
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