Senator Francisco Tatad

A few weeks ago, I was speaking to the 102^nd Conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Berlin when the United Nations population clock marked the arrival of the six-billionth human being. That most important arrival has since been identified by the UN as Adnan Nevic, born of Bosnian refugees.

In my speech, I wondered why, among the world’s richest countries, that great event of having six billion souls on God’s planet was being greeted with such gloom, alarm and panic instead of being celebrated, with fireworks and champagne - like the fete de Geneve? Was it not one more proof of God’s providence that despite wars, disasters, disease, contraception, sterilization, abortion, and nonstop efforts everywhere to undermine the family, the Good Lord continues to sustain it abundantly, as the cradle of human life? Did not the gentle Gandhi remind us that the world had enough for everyone’s need, although not enough for one man’s greed?

Some African and Latin American delegates were quite sympathetic with my remark. Not a few others, however, could not seem to believe that such a point was still being raised in such a forum at this time, long after powerful governments and institutions had proclaimed population growth as the greatest threat to our quality of life and the sustainability of our planet.

Just what are the facts?

According to UN estimates, total fertility rate is now below 2.1 children per woman of reproductive age in at least 61 countries or in roughly 2.6 billion or 44 percent of total world population. Everywhere else, all trends are down. There is not a single country today where total fertility rate or crude birth rate is rising or at a standstill.

Nonetheless, because of improved nutrition and health care, except probably in conflict- or AIDS-stricken African countries, life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the past 50 years. Thus, no matter how few are added, the total number still keeps on growing. In most developed countries, too, the proportion of older persons now exceeds that of children. Worldwide, one person out of ten is over 60. In another 50 years, there will be one such person out of five.

But where high fertility and birth rates among the poor countries used to terrify the rich, the merest increase in population scares them now. First, it was a matter of growth rates; then it became a matter of numbers. The original thought was that by shrinking family size to two children per unit, maximum, world population would settle to a smaller total by the year 2000. But even with China contributing its terrible one-child policy, that proved incorrect. And only the poor are growing and have grown.

Since the rich countries have grown infecund, greater efforts are needed to bring the poor countries to the same state. But as this program has already failed, it can only fail again, and again. Why? Because the whole idea is wrong. First, they proclaimed population as the problem, then they decided that ‘population control,’ using of course a much more attractive name, would take care of everything, without having to address the problems of the population. It does not work that way at all.

Since 1974, when the first international population conference in Bucharest recommended universal contraception, hundreds of billions of dollars had been spent by the rich countries and institutions trying to cure childbearing ~among married women. That money could have changed the lives of millions in the third world without homes and without safe drinking water. But nothing of the sort happened. So the poor just begot poorer children.

In the West, a severe demographic winter has turned once vigorous societies into a murderous desert from which all celebration of conjugal love and human life has been banished forever. But unlike any other winter, it threatens to be permanent; there is no prospect of spring. One child will have to be shared by four lucky grandparents; by contrast, a third world grandparent will have a riot of great grandchildren around him or her.

Glamorized by the media as the ultimate expression of the sexual revolution and consumerism, population control has produced not merely a bias against but a real hatred of motherhood, fatherhood, childbearing, and family life as a whole. Among the unborn, it has created the heinous crime of being unwanted by the very individuals whose carnal union is the proximate cause of their being. For such crime, the penalty is death, death without the benefit of formal charges, trial or official sentence, even in societies that take pride in due process and their having permanently abolished the capital sentence.

In an attempt to stanch the demographic recession, some very rich countries-- have tried to throw in all sorts of incentives for married women to bear more children. But they have not had the humility or the courage to abandon universal contraception and the killing of the unborn. Predictably, there have been no takers. For the sexual revolution had long taught them the new lifestyle - sex without love, without commitment, without consequence; union without marriage; pleasure without pain.

In particular, ‘reproductive rights’ have been invented, not for some Chinese or Tibetan women to reproduce without state consent, but rather to give women the ‘human right’ to terminate any pregnancy anytime for any reason whatsoever. Since everything else is being done to abolish motherhood altogether, the deserts of the West are likely to remain barren forever. They will have to look to foreign migration, as is happening now, just to keep their factories and social services running. Asians and Africans who manage to learn the language well will become tomorrow’s Europeans.

As for the poor countries that have followed the failed program, so much the worse for their having given the population planners full run of their health services, not to mention their core values systems. Priorities are distorted; the fight against the most prevalent diseases never gets as much attention as the fight against pregnancy, which has never been a disease. Some clinics may not be able to dress a stab wound for want of alcohol, cloth or cotton, but they would have crates upon crates of pills and condoms. Where divorce, ‘same-sex marriage,’ or abortion is prohibited by the constitution, media and NGO attack the prohibition, and bills are filed in Congress that have no chance of ever reaching the floor, solely to promote noisy debate in the press, radio and television. This is happening in the Philippines.

In these countries, whatever the official claim, there is no real social-economic analysis or planning worth its name. The planners, instead of looking for real solutions to real problems, simply repeat the mantra that social progress is impossible for so long as population growth does not sink below replacement levels. They never bother to remember that all great economic strides in history have been accomplished or at least accompanied by a robust population.

It is a lonely road which population control has carved for all. At the end of this road is an even lonelier place, a barren and joyless world that regards life as the cause of everything that is wrong. Obviously the authors did not intend it at all. But it is there, arid as the grim reality becomes grimmer, the more intense is their resolve to inflict it upon others, who are unprepared, unwilling or simply unable to say it is all wrong.

Despite the failure in Bucharest, Mexico, Cairo, Beijing, Copenhagen, Istanbul, Nairobi, New York and elsewhere during these last 25 years to deconstruct the family and make abortion on demand a ‘human right’ for all women everywhere, there is a renewed effort, associated with the turn of the century and the millennium, to manipulate governments into reaffirming their ‘commitment’ to the UN social agenda by translating ‘non-binding’ UN conference declarations into national laws that would make divorce, same-sex ‘marriage’, and abortion part of the universal legal regime. Sadly, some governments seem prepared to carry this baggage onto the next millennium.

What no one on the world scene, after Pope John Paul II, has said with enough frequency or conviction, but which we must say now with some courage before it passes on as part of our legacy to the future, is that we have suffered more than enough from this abomination. The routine, legalized killing of millions of innocent and helpless unborn children by nations and governments that reserve their selective indignation against lesser violations of human rights elsewhere is one of the most sordid, shameful and repugnant crimes ever to stain the history and conscience of man. It presents us with a peculiar case of ethnic cleansing, beside which Kosovo pales in comparison. For this reason, we - families, governments and civil society everywhere - must renounce it now, once and for all. We must rebel against it, and we, the families of the world, must lead this rebellion.

Unless we do so, the next century will not be a century of knowledge but of ignorance, and the next millennium will add nothing but dishonor and shame to our Christian civilization. In the language of Eliot, it would give us knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; knowledge of speech but not of silence; knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge would bring us nearer to our ignorance; all our ignorance, nearer to death; but nearer to death, no nearer to God.

How can we, for instance, in the name of human rights, dream of extinguishing the benighted practice of ‘genital mutilation’ in black Africa, when its strongest enemies in the West practice, and would have the rest of us practice, fetal mutilation, which is a more outrageous offense?

How can we possibly create a truly ‘borderless’ world, with open markets for the benefit of all mankind, when its strongest champions have turned the woman’s womb, which is revered in most cultures as the temple of life, into a death chamber, and decided to exclude permanently, through legalized abortion, millions upon millions of possible consumers and producers from any market activity whatsoever?

How can we talk of nourishing nature back to its original purpose and form when the rich and powerful have decided that people pollute and are not nearly half as valuable as rain forests, sea turtles, dolphins and whales, and should, therefore, be put at the service of the plant and animal kingdoms, rather than the other way around?

These questions have been asked many times before. But it is important that they be asked again here in Geneva, where the world marks with pride the anniversary of the Geneva conventions, which guarantee civilized conduct and respect for human rights even in war. For the war on population and the family is the most savage and brutal war ever waged by the greatest powers on earth against the weakest and most innocent of all God’s creatures. From the sheer number of its victims alone, which now exceeds the number of those killed in all the great wars, what we are witnessing today is nothing less than the third world war, undeclared and unacknowledged by the great powers, and without regard to the Geneva conventions.

As we gather here today, we must call on the families of the world to see that this war has gone far beyond what human capacity and conscience need to endure. The world must see that it has done more than enough harm, and that it must stop for all times, now. The West must be made to see that, from its own folly, only the still active population of the third world, not the aging and dying population of the first, can promise deliverance. Only those who continue to believe that life is a gift hold the key to the salvation of man. They are the ones who have something to say to the rest of humanity at this time; the West must listen to them now.

Everything has been said. The theology is settled, the philosophy certain, the science correct; life, love and goodness will triumph, as they always do, in the end. As a blessed man of our times says, “God never loses any battles.” Yet we must fight those battles. The attack on the family is an attack on everything on which the family stands; it is an attack on man, on the Church, on God above all. Within the political realm, it has used and continues to use political bodies and institutions to achieve its ends. This needs an adequate political response.

But this is spiritual warfare, more than a political one. And it will not be won unless the families of the world take it up, and unless they do so, in their own name and in God’s name, above all. The armies, weapons and techniques will be different from those seen at Saxa Rubra in 312, but the inspiration must be the same: the Cross of Christ. For this war could not have gone this far had Europe not first been dechristianized. There was a time when Novalis could sing, Christenheit oder Europa, and Belloc could declare, “Europe is the Church and the Church is Europe.” But all that is gone. A new paganism has taken over where once stood the mightiest Christian faith. Europe, therefore, must be rechristianized. Only then will we finally cast out the devil and see the return of strong and vibrant families into our homes.

During the G-7 summit in Cologne last June, men and women of all faiths formed human chains to proclaim their solidarity with the poor and demand that the debt of the heavily indebted poor countries be written off. From this Congress, we, too, could launch a similar effort.

We could now form a chain of families, spanning all continents and cutting across all cultural barriers and territorial boundaries. We could form what I would for now call — for want of a better word - a transterritorial republic of families, made up of men and women of all nations and faiths, determined to maintain the original dignity and role of the family and make it a living source, channel and object of authentic human goodness. It is not one more power structure we seek, but simply enough space for the best universal values of the family to be lived and transmitted, according to their original purpose and design.

The idea may sound utopian. But I believe a simultaneous raising of hearts and minds, a simultaneous witnessing, from one end of the world to the other, by families of faith and by men and women who still believe the family is a good and blessed thing, could achieve our desired end. Let us see then if we can take this one small step, and help everyone else see that ours is not and was never meant to be a sad and joyless world, that we can fill it with so much more life and love, laughter and light, generosity and goodness, solidarity and strength, so long as we are docile enough to say ‘yes’ to grace.