Population Control and Poverty

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Population control, through education and sometimes other means, has always been a tool in helping to curb poverty in developing countries. If families/ women control the amount of children they have, the amount of money that a child takes can help the livelihood of some of these families. I’m mostly speaking of families in real poverty to survive here btw.

A NYTimes writer, Nicolas Kristoff, wrote in an opinion article that really made me start to wonder,

We sometimes imagine that family planning promotion is a matter of handing out condoms or inserting IUD’s, and in fact it’s so much more than that. It’s a comprehensive policy of counseling women, offering a range of options, providing them some respect and dignity and follow-up, and raising their status more generally. That’s why girls’ education is so fundamental, for nothing has a more powerful effect on a girl’s trajectory than going to school.

It really got me to wonder about that student of mine and her life’s trajectory due to her education. She really did fight against all odds to get where she’s gotten. She has 4 older brothers, one older sister, and one younger brother. Her older brothers were all thugs, her mother got pregnant at 18, neither parents went to college (or graduated high school)… I think she even has to move out this year due to the fact that her parents can’t house her anymore…

And yet, she fought since middle school to get her A’s, she fought for all her advanced classes even when the school and counselors wanted to give her less, she got to my Calculus class as a junior, and she worked hard enough that she can graduate high school a whole year early.

And all these goals and ambitions to go to college has been there even before she was a ninth grader when I met her.

But this education that I’m so proud of her for getting, was exactly the reason she could not have that baby. The goals of going to Berkeley that she had fought so hard to attain was exactly why it wasn’t even an option.

So often we can fight to try to bring people out of their states of poverty. We can desire education for them, a means of leaving a broken state that they may be living in… and yet so often we forget of the sacrifices that those goals take. So often, it really does take going against what your family might desire or what your teacher might desire…

Life is so much more complicated than we can ever imagine. Maybe this is a bold statement and it might quite possibly step on some people’s toes, but I really have no idea what would’ve been the more righteous choice, whether to pursue that education or pursue that baby.

I know for those who are so pro-life, this makes no sense at all. But what about to those who spend their lives fighting for social justice in the same name of God that makes you pro-life? Does it make you uncomfortable too? Am I just being swayed by the things of this world? Am I falling into the definition of “justice” of this world and not our God’s?

You know, this is why God simply needs obedient people. He doesn’t care for those who fight so hard for such specific causes because whatever the heck it is we so righteously fighting for can still be so narrow-minded. Sometimes, God really does ask his people to do some crazy things that doesn’t really make sense. I always think of the parable of the shrewd manager for baffling case examples. I still don’t really get it, but being shrewd was definitely rewarded over being honest. Breaking the alabaster jar is an example where obedience took forsaking the poor for that moment.

Anyways, Jesus knew all, yet he did not judge. I gotta learn to judge much less still and obey much more. How incredibly hard this can be.

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