High fertility rate is good news

“Fertility rate down but more mothers dying,” read the headline of a front-page report in the Inquirer (5/2/2014). The facts and figures quoted in the report were substantially correct but the conclusions, sadly, were incorrect because they ignored certain realities. The report cited the apparent increase in the number of Filipino mothers dying during childbirth, and went on to attribute the problem to the country’s total fertility rate (TFR), or the average number of children that each woman is expected to have by the end of her reproductive years.

Maternal deaths during childbirth are much more directly attributable to the shortage—or absence in some cases—of maternal prenatal care and awareness of the need thereof, resulting from regional budgetary availabilities. These are shown in the Department of Health’s regional statistics, which were quoted by Rep. Roilo Golez during the deliberations on the Reproductive Health Law. In other words, maternal deaths are due to the absence of medical care from health professionals or the lack of medical supplies—and not from sheer pregnancy or the high TFR.

To illustrate, Central Luzon provinces enjoy 4-6 times less maternal deaths compared to other regions due to higher awareness and availability of maternal care from public and private facilities.

The same report stated that TFR has been cut by more than half, but that the “bad news” is that it remains the highest in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. That the Philippines’ TFR remains among the highest in Asean should be considered good news. Our robust population growth rate, resulting in more young, educated, English-speaking workers, is in fact the strong foundation today of the Philippine economy as evidenced by the growth of foreign exchange income ($37 billion in 2013) and the number of our workers overseas and in our call centers and business-processing centers. Our workers are needed by the aging populations in Europe, Japan, America, Singapore, Canada, etc.

No less than Citibank (Citigroup) in a research article cited the good prospects of the Philippine economy, precisely due to “favorable demographics.” Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp. in its January 2012 report “…sees [the Philippines] as the world’s 16th biggest economy in 2050 … on account of its demographics; its young, educated, English-speaking workers…”

To call our robust (although fast-declining) TFR of 3.1 in 2010 “bad news” is to say that the Philippines should decrease TFR faster, and therefore move faster toward inevitably becoming an aging society like many other countries in the world today.

When TFR drops, the number of our young, educated, English-speaking workers will likewise drop. Would this not be tantamount to killing the proverbial goose that lays the golden egg?

It is unfortunate that many Filipinos still subscribe to the discredited “population bomb” thinking propounded in the mid-1960s by Paul Ehrlich, who predicted massive shortages of food and supplies due to faster rising demand from exploding population numbers than supply. Instead, human ingenuity has since increased food productivity and supplies, averting Ehrlich’s and his predecessor Thomas Malthus’ predicted chaos. Ironically, the world now has aging populations and decreasing numbers of peoples, starting with but not limited to the rich world. Instead of the population bomb exploding as earlier predicted, world populations are imploding!

Acknowledged today by most demographers, population implosion is happening because of greater percentages of women in the work force, with less time to have babies; more families moving to urban centers from rural areas, having less babies; and higher standards of living worldwide, as reflected in the fact that rich countries have far less TFR than poor countries.

Then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in his 1974 National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 2000 to then President Richard Nixon, said America must concern itself with the fast-growing populations of the world (15 countries, including the Philippines) because, unless “population explosion” was stopped, these countries would (1) sink further into poverty, become economically unmanageable and present terroristic threats to America; (2) pollute the environment, affecting America; and (3) endanger US access to strategic raw materials available in these countries.

As a result of NSSM 2000, the United States embarked on a worldwide effort to work with its allies and the United Nations to spend large sums in a campaign to decrease population growth. This campaign managed to convince many citizens of the world to think actively or subliminally that population/TFR growth was undesirable and should be stopped.

In the Philippines, Filipinos intuitively think that the population is still exploding because of the large numbers of informal settlers (more than 50 percent of the Metro Manila population is made up of informal settlers). But overcrowding in the cities is more the result of rural families migrating to urban centers in search of work, livelihood and security, and not of population explosion.

It’s time we corrected the thinking that our high TFR is “bad news.” On the contrary, it brings about our demographic dividend and results in economic growth. Maternal deaths are not caused by the high TFR, but by the lack or absence of maternal prenatal care in many places.

Jose S. Sandejas holds a PhD in engineering. He is chair of Circle Foundation Inc. and is a former board member of the Philippine Population Commission.