It is God that gives children. It is God that raises children
That is the mantra that most Africans chant when you tell them about trying to plan their pregnancies and child spacing. I get furious, sometimes to the point of lashing out on these people.
What do you mean by God gives children, God raises children? Was he the one that had sex with you? Was it God that impregnated you? Was God the one that refused to use a condom? It's so pathetic seeing a family of 5 to 7 children, all from the same woman, with very shabby clothes, abysmal nutritional status being brought to the hospital every week.
The gross irresponsibility is quite infuriating. A man who is barely making ends meet for himself marries a woman who is jobless and with no source of livelihood. He struggles to feed himself and his wife and that doesnt bother him. He goes ahead to impregnant the woman when he barely has enough to even afford baby clothes. The woman gives birth to the first child and before 6months, she is pregnant with another child, meanwhile she is having to borrow money to feed the child she brought into the world six months ago without any hope of paying back the money she borrowed.
I hear things like this and I am sad to my bones. I ask myself why people do this. For one, I am aware that the knowledge of family planning and birth control is limited in these parts of the world. So for some people, ignorance could be their excuse, but there are those that even after telling them about family planning, spacing children, etc, they reply with the ridiculous sentence with which I opened this post.
That gets me really really angry, mehn. Like why could you be so cruel to bring a child into the world to suffer. Why? Why would you intentionally bring a child to the world and make the child suffer cruel conditions because you didn't think it necessary to plan the child's arrival.
The most annoying ones are the ones that have no plans for child birth. The woman goes into labor and they take her to a traditional place and sometimes she comes back home with a baby or she could have one complication and looses her life in the process. What does the man do? He doesnt even mourn his dead wife, he goes and finds another woman the very next week and before 1 month, he is married again.
Some even twist the bible when you tell them about family planning, they tell you that God said...
Be fruitful and multiply, replenish the earth..
But the same people believe that menopause is God's work. The same God that said we should be fruitful and multiply should have more sense than to put a limited number of eggs in the woman when he created her.
Child bearing is a beautiful thing. I have helped women bring their children into the world. But I would rather you abort the child than bring the child into the world to suffer. I know that is extreme, but knowing what women go through in pregnancy and what it takes to raise a child, I believe that is a better way to go.
The world is getting harder to live in, economically and even meteorologically. We should not bring children into our twisted version of the world. At least we should help them have a smooth sail in life.
My parents didn't practice family planning, I suffered as a child growing up.
You should have better sense than your parents did. That they did what they did doesn't mean you should follow in their footsteps. An eye for an eye, they say, makes the whole world go blind. Making it easy for your kids and they making it easy for their kids would ultimately leave the world a better place.
cheerio!