WHAT EXACTLY IS MEANT TO BE?

I recently read an article about how Jinky, the lead singer of the band Freestyle, suffered a miscarriage at six months of pregnancy. It was one of the most heartbreaking stories I’ve ever read, especially when it mentioned how she cradled her stillborn infant in her arms for “the first and last time.” Although to no small extent Jinky blames herself for what happened, her doctors have said otherwise; saying that there was really no one to blame for it. To be philosophical about it, the simplest conclusion is simply that it was not meant to be.

Whenever a financially secure couple fails to conceive despite great effort and modern advances in technology, the explanation invariably relied upon is that these people are not meant to have children, some not yet, some not ever. The problem with adopting this logic is applying it to the hundreds of thousands of families below the poverty line who conceive children like it was going out of style. So, if someone does not get pregnant, she is not meant to have children, but if someone does, then she is meant to? How does this account for so many underage/teen pregnancies? How does this account for the fact that many, if not most children born to these poor families grow up malnourished? To sum it all up: how does this explain the population explosion among the poorest of the poor? Were all of these people meant to have children?

To my mind, when one applies the logic three-dimensionally, it is possible to understand what is being said whenever a family incapable of supporting children yields yet another one. It is not solely a question of whether or not the couple itself is ready to have children, but a matter of how much any given society understands about sexual intercourse and reproduction. To put it another way, when a rich couple cannot have children, it could be that God is telling them that they were not meant to have children, but when poor couples have child after child after child, it could be God telling the leaders of the Filipino nation, both spiritual and secular, that something needs to be done about the widespread ignorance regarding reproduction.

The Catholic Church’s opposition to contraceptive devices is notorious. Over the last several years it has blocked a number of proposed bills by Congress aimed at making the use of contraceptives a national policy. The Church’s proposed method is natural contraception, which essentially calls for self-denial by the couple concerned.

I know a woman who is in her mid-thirties, successful and upwardly mobile. She has, however, had four children in about five years. By her own admission, she and her husband tried natural family planning, only to falter whenever they felt certain urges. They finally turned to birth control pills. Clearly, even professionals, who have the diligence to finish formal schooling and practice rather difficult professions that demand the utmost discipline, cannot entirely be relied upon to exercise the restraint that natural family planning calls for. Realistically, there is no way to expect an entire nation to abstain from sexual intercourse for roughly three-fourths of a month. The sexual urge is not a switch that can be turned on and off. In the case of married couples, sexual congress is a God-given right. The Church seriously overestimates its own influence if it believes that the Filipino people will stop having coitus on a regular basis just because it tells them to. In this country, the vast majority cannot even wait out a twenty-minute traffic jam without the urge to counter-flow. How can one ask the average tricycle driver, who would rather break every traffic law in existence than wait a few extra minutes to get from point A to point B to deny one of his most basic urges when he is with his wife?

There are, naturally, problems with indiscriminately handing out condoms and other artificial contraceptive devices. It is a simplistic solution to a deep-seated sociological problem. But nobody, except the Catholic Church and its adherents, is saying that education on family planning cannot be done hand-in-hand with making contraceptive devices readily available. The solution of the Church is admittedly an ideal one, where people all over the country are disciplined and concerned for the future of their children, both the existing ones and the ones they may yet conceive, but it miserably fails to address the reality. In this reality the only way to put the brakes on our runaway population growth is to stop the sperm cell from meeting the egg. Proper education on family planning is certainly going to take time, and unless we can halt this nonstop population growth, time is not likely to be on our side.

In short, the Church needs to be more flexible in its policies on family planning. Members of the clergy currently lament the erosion of the Church’s popularity among the people, more and more of whom find alternative denominations like Born Again Christianity more attractive. One of the reasons for this slow bleeding is the fact that the Church has grown out of touch with reality, and with what its flock really needs.