The household belonging to the bottom 20 percent of income groups in contrast usually has six to seven children with the mother struggling to augment the family’s meager earnings. Poor nutrition and ill-health are the lot of these children and one or two of them will not survive beyond the age of five. If they are lucky, some of them may get into very crowded and inadequately staffed public elementary schools. It is unlikely that any of them will finish high school and they face a bleak future in the ever competitive Philippine job market.

These two extremes reflect the disgraceful inequity in the availability of reproductive health services in the Philippines.

For the rich, information on sex and reproduction is easily available. Thus couples in the top quintile of income groups are able to plan their families using the most effective means of avoiding unplanned pregnancies. Health services throughout the life cycle of individuals and families are provided by medical specialists. Thus, maternal deaths are unheard of and infant and child mortalities are rare occurrences among those who live comfortably in gated subdivisions of the big cities of the country.

For the majority who are poor, sex education and other reproductive health information are not readily available in all localities. Mainly due to ignorance, poor couples are often faced with unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. Pre-natal care for the mothers is often inadequate. Professional attendance at birth is often optional and care of children afterwards is not always optimal. It is among this population segment that the so many maternal deaths occur that, at 150 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births, the Philippines ranks among the world’s least developed countries in terms of maternal mortality ration.

This is the stark reality of family health in Asia’s bastion of Roman Catholicism. It is a country where abortion is illegal and often characterized as a heinous crime but where almost half a million women each year take the risk of unsafe induced termination of pregnancies rather than bear the burden of yet another hungry mouth to feed.

This is the context in which the Philippines will join other nations of the world to celebrate World Population Day on July 11.

At a population growth rate of nearly two million additional Filipinos each year, the Philippine population will reach a benchmark of 100 million in the next five years. Given this, even assuming an optimistic economic growth rate of more than 5 percent annually, the Philippines will almost surely fall further behind its neighbors during this period.

The future scenario may even be bleaker considering the world food situation, the international oil status, and the impending global environmental crisis. If the country continues to ignore rapid population growth as a major factor in development, Filipinos, especially the poor, will suffer the consequences in terms of lower social development.

The aftermath of Typhoon Frank (known as Fengshen to the rest of the world) is a stark warning of graver catastrophes if the links between human activities and environmental degradation are disregarded by the country’s leadership.

In the immediate vicinity of the maritime disaster of the "Princess of the Stars", the global food problem has become a stark reality with the adverse effects on fishing (the area’s main source of food and livelihood) heightened by the revelation of the presence of 10 metric tons of a pesticide in the wreck’s cargo hold. In the island of Panay, where agriculture and food production will take a while to recover, attention should also be given to the possibility that the heavy mudflows generated by the rains were due in part to denudation of the island’s forest cover.

In terms of numbers, the toll of the recent natural disasters in the Philippines pales in contrast to that in the vast country of China. However, considering this country’s archipelagic nature and its geographic location, the possibility of even graver events later in the year is not to be discounted. It should be remembered that we are not even halfway through the present typhoon season.