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| Planned babies will mean no more beggars. |
LOOKING into the eyes of the teenager begging between the cars, I wondered what would happen if we made men choose to have children, instead of carelessly making so many unplanned babies?
In my ideal world, this young man would then certainly not have been born into a poverty trap with a life expectancy of 20 years.
He would instead have a father who cared for him and a useful life to look forward to. Now his day comprises prowling the lines of cars trapped by the traffic lights, slapping on the windows of women drivers to leer at their scared or angry faces. A pest. Unwanted. Unplanned.
It’s not just the teenage boys on the streets who suffer from being unplanned. At yet another national anti-HIV campaign, this one held in Pietermaritzburg in July, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa said over 72 000 teenage girls give birth to a child each year at South Africa’s health facilities. And every week, at least 2 000 young women between the ages of 15 and 24 are infected with HIV, giving South Africa one of the world’s highest rates of infection.
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| A typical sight in every SA town. |
Ramaphosa’s message to the sugar daddies blamed for these infections was a stern “leave the young women alone” and “find love among your peers”.
Ramaphosa also told the pupils bused in for the event to seek out information and services to prevent HIV infection and pregnancies “that are undesirable”. One could almost hear the Doppler effect as this advice sped in one ear and out the other, as have all similar speeches delivered to teenagers through the ages.Meanwhile, the many devices available to prevent pregnancies don’t work for teenage girls, simply because they cannot afford them. For proof of this, look no further than the Education Department’s record of over 15 000 births at SA’s schools in 2015. Or the Health Department’s 11 338 “pregnancy terminations” recorded at its all-but-hidden abortion centres from April to December last year. This gives a low average of only 4,6 official abortions a day, but NGOs warn the number of unofficial abortions is much higher.
Cut the sanctimonious bullshit
Desperate women go the abortionists who advertise on lamp poles and rubbish bins because of the stigma still attached to this procedure, and the shocking statistic that one in three women in SA still thinks abortion is illegal, or is told by the sanctimonious that it should be.
To stop this constant wave of unplanned babies and replace them with generations of wanted kids, we need to move the decision to have children squarely onto the man’s shoulders. The means to do so already exists, and the best known is called Vasalgel.
This gel is made of large molecules, or polymers, that are injected into the vas deferens to block sperm, but allow semen through. Hence the boy “shoots blanks”.
The sperm flow can be restored after weeks or years, simply by dissolving the polymers with another injection of a solution of bicarbonate of soda. This relatively painless, cheap and reversible vasectomy has now been trialed for over 15 years in India, but men there seem content to use the gel as a permanent male contraceptive rather than a temporary family planning aid.
In the United States, the Parsemus Foundation began developing a similar polymer contraceptive seven years ago. After publishing several successful, humanely conducted animal trials, the Parsemus Foundation hopes to start its first clinical trial on humans next year and then plans to sell the gel cheaply around the world. Their problem, as with any other product or service that can’t be sold afresh every month, is lack of funding. That and the fact that none of the sanctimonious has to date demanded that the men in their congregations plan their children to ensure the unborn baby’s right not to suffer.
Note, the word is plan, not ban.
A Draconian paradise
In my dream society, all teenage boys would volunteer to get the gel injection, knowing they not have to worry aboutpapgeld, and that they can apply to have as many babies as they can afford after they turn 25 years old. That bit of maturity would hopefully help each boy to become that highest achievement of manhood — a good dad.
If the young man cannot prove a means to support the child, then no new baby. Sure, this is draconian. But delaying people from making babies until they can care for them would be good for all of us. Yes, populations will shrink rapidly, which would have huge ramifications, especially for fiat currencies and our wasteful systems of mass production. In their stead, crypto currencies and production on demand would ensure that the industrious continue to prosper.
The shrinking populations would soon stabilise, for men do get broody too. But in my draconian world of enforced, reversible vasectomies and people only allowed to have children after 25, no child would grow up on the streets as an unwanted pest. I think we owe our children such a future. Do you?
This opinion piece was first published in The Witness in August 2017.
