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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 ...
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?
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