Hope for Slum Communities: Population
SECTION V: ENVIRONMENTAL HOPEby Scott Bessenecker
Excerpted from forthcoming The Quest for Hope in Slum Communities,
Reprinted with permission ISBN 1932805-192 World Vision Press in partnership with Authentic Media
expected publication date Summer 2005
Water and Sanitation
Population
Urban Planning
“Be fruitful and multiply” is the first command given by God in the Bible (Genesis 1:28). In fact, according to Genesis these words are the very first ever uttered by God to humans. Say what you will about the human tendency to ignore God’s directives, after surpassing six billion inhabitants on the planet in 2003, it would seem we’ve done a pretty good job at carrying out this one. At its heart, the command seems to imply that humans were designed to live not in isolation but rather in families, clans, and communities. It may also suggest that the design for humanity bends away from a celibate existence and toward one that involves male-female intimacy. We were meant to create families and communities through sexual intimacy between a man and woman.
Something so profoundly central to God’s design seems conspicuously absent from the world of Christian development. Certainly, Christians talk a good deal about the destructiveness of both sex outside of marriage and abortion. Bringing children into the world without the support of a committed nuclear family structure has created untold hardship. And where the nuclear family has disintegrated, so has societal health. In addition, the Scriptures are clear that life in the womb is sacred, soul-bearing, and God-crafted. Abortion is the ultimate oppression of a voiceless people. Yet the sensibilities of some believers are offended by introducing the topics of family planning and sex into discussions about how the church can serve the poor.
For some Christians it is God who opens or closes the womb, and to fiddle with birth control is tantamount to playing God. But such a view discounts the fact that God has given humans self-discipline: the ability and freedom to determine when and how often sex should occur, and therefore when and how often potential pregnancy might take place. Natural family planning is birth control.1 This view also ignores the God-given ingenuity of humans to use available resources in order to meet needs. Planes allow us to fly (something we weren’t naturally designed to do), and contraceptives are used to influence when we bring children into a family. These issues are profoundly relevant in our quest to bring health and wholeness into densely populated slum communities. Transformation must address the macro questions of population as well as the micro questions of family planning.
Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics, dispels some common myths in his essay “Population: Delusion and Reality,” (from The Nine Lives of Population Control, edited by Michael Cromartie, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995) Sen attacks the notion that food shortage and immigration to the West is linked to overpopulation in the developing world. His main concern is that governments driven by fear are likely to embrace coercive policies of population control: policies like forced sterilization, which take those most affected out of the decision process. In the end, Sen highlights the impact of education for women in Kerala, India, in driving down population in comparison with China’s more forceful population policies.
Birth Spacing: Three to Five Saves Lives (3.5 MB PDF), published by the Population Information Program at Johns Hopkins University, argues persuasively that helping the poor to space the births of their children more generously will dramatically impact the health of both mother and child. The article looks at some of the factors that affect birth spacing and campaigns that have been effective in helping encourage longer periods between births.
The discussions of birth control, sex, and family planning need to return with candor to people of faith, especially as we seek to bring wholeness and healing to places of brokenness and despair among the urban poor.
Notes
1. Natural family planning is the intentional ordering of when sex occurs in relation to a woman’s cycle of ovulation in order to avoid or achieve pregnancy. This method is often encouraged by those who believe birth-control devices are unbiblical.
Water and Sanitation
Population
Urban Planning
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