Charly Boy in this missive questions the rationale behind the propensity by poor people to have large families they cannot support.
Read what he has to say…
Go ye into the world be fruitful and multiply, oh! yes that’s what the good book says. However certain people take this literally. They see children as a blessing from God and they view it as their duty to fulfill this prophecy by promoting procreation, rejecting all forms of birth control, including natural family planning.
Children are viewed as a reward from God and the more children one has, the more one has been blessed by God but the big question is, does this put food on the table especially in this hard times?!!
I’m still trying to wrap my head around why the poor have more children when they can’t afford to raise them. And why the rich have fewer children when they can afford to have more. The population demography of any society is vital in Nation building and governments around the world have effected policies to control this growth.
A very good example will be China’s one child per family policy, which has now been upgraded to two. It will be commonsensical to say that people breed their kind this means a rich family is most likely to have rich children, and a poor family, poor children. In Nigeria we have a large majority of low income earners who are multiplying the number of children they have. Children they can not afford to take care of. So wouldn’t it make common sense to say that the less one earns, the less children you should have?
This is one of life’s ironies.
People who are rich and can afford to have more children will not yet those that can not afford it do. Low income spouses spend more leisure time together than families of high income earners. It will be typical in our society today, to see a high income family where both couples are gainfully employed, close work late and get home from a hectic day too tired and stressed to indulge in any intimate act but the lower income earner seem to have more leisure time and less distractions to focus on their love plays with their tomato selling wives. Why is this so?
Breeding children has become a recreational sport for the poor, I feel this is an issue that we all collectively as a society need to address. I use to think that it was mostly in the rural areas that this kind of demography is rampant but that’s not the case, the other day I was shocked to find out that a friend’s security guard who earns 30,000.00 naira monthly has two wives and ten children. Hummmmm, How on earth are they going to survive on that, what type of education, feeding, clothing can he provide for them in today’s Nigeria. Don’t they understand that intimacy between spouses is also an occasion to be savored and pleasurably enjoyed and not just for making babies?
We all need to wake up to the harsh effects that this is having. Government needs to have more enlightenment and sensitization programs that will address this issue. There is a need to inform the populace about the harmful effects of having children that one cannot afford to raise properly. The most obvious aftereffects are when you see children hawking in the street in order to fend for their families. This is not an issue for the government to tackle alone, the private sector also has to join in. The first solution will be circulating constant information about family planning: Due to a range of factors including education and location of living, poor women don’t have access to as many family control measures as richer women so richer women have substantially fewer “unintended” pregnancies than poorer women.
For all my brothers and sisters coping with survival I urge you all to think more about family planning, I know God blesses us with children but we must learn to plan our family according to our means. By the way, I have 9 children but thank God my school fees days are over or else e for hardooooo. So my simple summary today is, cultivate your sperm according to your pocket size. A word they say, is good for the wise.