PREVENTION IS BETTER…

Mar 18, 2013 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

There is a story about a woman who had fourteen children before realising that her problem was caused by a hearing disability. It seems that every night before retiring to bed her husband would ask, “You think we should go to sleep or what?” And because of her problem she would respond, “What?”
Obviously, her predicament was not a phenomenon purely of procreation but also of prevention. Her hardness of hearing was complemented by her ignorance of the need for planning. While they call it “birth control” the phrase itself does not make sense. You really need the control nine months before the birth, as many people including me and many of my colleagues can attest.
Family planning was not an issue when I was growing up in the countryside in Trinidad. Women made children, and continued to make children while they could make children. Those who could not were urged to have, while those who had were urged to have more. It still is not unusual to hear a woman being told by her mother-in-law, friend, relation or even casual acquaintance, “Look at that poor baby by himself. He needs a sister (or brother).” There is a lot of pressure on women to have more and more children.
This attitude is one of those cultural hangovers that persists in spite of changing circumstances. In ancient days people had many children because of the high infant mortality and the need, in agrarian societies, to have many hands to help with the work.
Additionally, the greater the number of children, the greater the possibility that at least one would take care of you in your old age when you were no longer fit to work. Now, the situation has changed. Infant mortality has dropped and society has evolved organically. Agrarian occupations are only part of the many work options now available.
Also, people have moved away from the countryside, breaking up the extended kinship system which helped in managing the large families. Urban life almost automatically leads to small families.
Or so the theories tell you. In spite of the widespread availability of condoms, the truth is stranger than friction. People continue to have children they cannot afford. Families continue to be unplanned. One woman admitted to comedian Grouch Marx that she had twelve children because she and her husband enjoyed it. He responded that he enjoyed a good cigar but he did not keep it in his mouth all the time.
Sometimes people do not plan their families because of pure ignorance. A woman on a bus with three sets of twins trailing behind her was asked, “Do you always get twins?” She replied, “Oh, no! Hundreds of times we don’t get anything.” A young man whose wife gave birth to a son, commented on the wonders of nature saying, “Exactly nine months ago we made love for the first time.” When five minutes later he was informed by an agitated nurse that his wife had given birth to a daughter, he exclaimed, “Isn’t nature wonderful. Exactly nine months ago, at exactly that time, my wife and I made love for the second time.”
He added, “Anyhow, I am going out to get something to eat. The next one isn’t due for another hour.” There was the story of the man who went to buy condoms for the first time and was told that it was $4.95 plus tax. He said he always wondered how you keep them on.
The responsibility for family planning, and the blame for the lack of it, always falls on women. All the jokes about sexual irresponsibility are on women. For instance, there is one about a woman who had sex without taking her birth control pills. She was charged for practising licence without a medicine. There is the joke about the new birth control pill for women. You put it between your knees and keep it there.
Or the one about the best contraceptive being a glass of water. You take it before you go to bed- and nothing else. Woody Allen, the comedian said he was involved in an extremely good example of oral contraception two weeks ago. He asked a girl to go to bed with him and she said, “No.”
Education is the golden key to enlightenment. The educated woman is more likely to plan her family, and plan for her family, than women who are not educated. Family planning cannot be enforced, and the engineering or technological aspects of birth control cannot be made mandatory in democratic societies like ours.
Additionally, men’s attitudes and behaviours, while changing in developed countries, remain unyielding in most developing countries. Getting men to attend clinics, or even to discuss family planning, is as difficult as ending the perception, or more appropriately “misconception”, that birth control is purely the responsibility of women to manage.
While health and family planning organisations, both national and international, struggle with the social dynamics, the population of the world is growing insupportably. Life is tough for women with large families, and will get even tougher.
A woman who got on a bus with seven children was asked by the conductor, “Are these all yours, lady? Or is it a picnic?” “They’re all mine,” she replied. “And it’s no picnic.”

* Tony Deyal was last seen saying that one of the best things people can do for their descendants is to sharply limit the number of them.