"Why not just use a condom?".
"Really, why do they have so many kids? Why marry so early?"
Said a post by an angry redditor about poor people having more kids when they are financially unable to raise them properly.
I , for one, could not see anything but privilege in that post.
I understand their concerns, I do. It seems simple enough to reason: The government has many schemes for proper family planning, planned parenthood and safe sex is properly advertised, so why can't they use it?
Except it isn't as simple.
To someone who was born in a financially decent family, making life choices with their financial constraints in mind wouldn't seem impossible.But can you really look at a person who's below the poverty line through the same lens? Someone who has to break their back working to ensure the next day's meal?
Spreading awareness about personal responsibility and accountability is definitely important. I know I can't just take it away by bringing in systemic factors here. But aggressive finger pointing and blaming doesn't sit well with me, and to someone living in a highly constrained environment, i doubt if such approach would bring about any actual understanding.
It's also necessary to take in the fact that many of such people are day laborers - meaning their survival is reliant on their physical capabilities.
"Who will take care of me when I'm old?" is a very real concern when you don't have the means to stitch yourself a financial safety net, and your physical strength reduces day by day. Children are their financial nets in this case. Is it ideal, children as retirement plans? No.
(It's not ideal either that we are seemingly fine with having people struggle for basic human needs while wealth pools unfairly in select circles, but yeah, that's for another day.)
These people work with premises that are wildly different from ours. It's unfair and tone deaf to subject them to harshness while sitting on the comfort our premises offer us.
Now it's not to say that we should not look into them at all. But a solution geared towards this is rarely quick-realizing. The only effective way I see is, offering quality education to their kids, and providing a level playing field with a fair shot at opportunities. It doesn't seem reasonable to me to expect extreme social awareness from someone who's been struggling to survive all their life. When you're looking towards seeing actual improvement, focusing on a long term solution like this would bring in more solid and visible change on a larger scale, and have the change actually sustain. None of this process is easy to bring by - we're talking about decades of strong implementation of policies.
And women. Uneducated women have lesser power and agency over their own bodies. We cannot ignore that fact here. We also have the problem of preferring male babies over female babies. Since find the sex of the fetus is banned here in India, its not uncommon at all to see people having babies till they get a male one. We have contraceptives, but how many women can actually get one? Higher fertility rates of poor women is mostly due to poor women’s lack of opportunity, lack of power, as well as the lack of access to modern contraceptives. No matter how much you make contraceptives accessible, it lands short if significant progress is not made in the first two areas as well. Vast majority of studies have found associations between women’s empowerment and lower birth rates. India is still in desperate need of feminism.
…okay, but what about the children? what do we say to the ones who are actually born in those circles?
I do understand where the original post came from, I just don't think that there is, as i said before, a quick solution to it. Better and more secure jobs for the parents, welfare schemes, proper healthcare, and free education to the kids - this is what i think would move us forward effectively. Take the example of TamilNadu - Kamarajar, in his tenure as Chief Minister introduced schemes like Mid-Day meal programme, compulsary education till 11th grade, and various such schemes by other parties played a huge role in poverty alleviation. TamilNadu's MPI (Multidimensional Poverty Index) was as high as 70% in the 1960s. It has now reduced to 1.43%. Just an example.
But I'll write another piece(s) on where we are still going wrong.
Something else I noticed quite for a while is, for a lack of better term, the social commentator version of fast-fashion, the fast-social-commentator, the online activist…? lol.
Anyways. I see people like this rushing to pass judgment on others without bothering to look into their own privilege, and the misfortune of others. It just seems less like actual concern and more like "Hey look how socially aware and responsible I am!". Sometimes, effective change cannot be achieved overnight. When you see a byproduct of systemic cycle, the solution also involves the reform of said system, and good luck bringing change in a single-sentence solution. Refusal to look beyond our biases would hinder any attempt to arrive at a productive solution approach, and is just lazy activism at best. When issues like this are discussed, we should equip ourselves to work with the conditions that prevail, and not fall back onto which is intellectually easier to wrestle with.
(more of a rant, eh?)