Freedom for Families?

I was shocked and appalled to read today about the draft Kerala Women’s Code currently being considered by the state’s government. The code is simultaneously an affront to the basic human rights of individuals and families, an attack on religious liberty, and a gross over-extension of state power.

The draft Code’s basic objective is to control population growth by limiting couples to two children. It aims to achieve this by,

• Withholding government benefits from any couple choosing to have more than two children
• Providing a cash payment of up to Rs. 50,000 to couples if women wait until they are at least 19 to marry and at least 20 to have their first child
• Providing a similar payment when a second child is born if there has been at least a three year gap between the first and second children
• Providing health insurance to couples below the poverty line if one spouse undergoes sterilization
• Providing free abortions at all hospitals
• Imposing a fine of Rs. 10,000 or up to three months in jail on any person or social/religious organization campaigning against family planning and population control

The problems with this draft policy are myriad. First, it is a terrible intrusion of the government into one of the most personal areas of people’s lives. The number of children that couples choose to have and their use (or not) of family planning techniques is a decision for those couples alone. It is based on many factors, including their desire for children, their moral and religious convictions, their ages and the needs of their households, etc. The government is grossly overstepping by seeking to create incentives and disincentives in this area. It is limiting one of the most basic freedoms that people hold to order their families in the way they choose.

Second, this is an attack on religious liberty. This sort of family planning and population control is contrary to religious teaching in many traditions and therefore held to be unethical by various religious communities. This is why both Christian and Muslim leaders in Kerala have raised strong objections to this law or anything like it. By forcing families to use family planning or abortion to comply with state regulations, the government is ensuring that people are not free to practice their religions even within their own homes. And it goes so far as to impose jail time on religious leaders based on the content of their religious teaching. India, as a secular, religiously diverse country cannot place these sorts of extreme limits on religious expression and freedom of speech.

Third, and perhaps more fundamentally, the code reveals a belief that people are a burden, rather than valuable. It promotes the idea that people are a problem because they are a hindrance to India’s development. This is not true. In fact, people are India’s greatest resource. People are not simply consumers of resources; they are also producers of wealth. People work and produce things, they offer services, they generate ideas that solve problems. People are assets, with the potential to create and discover. The problem is not people, but poverty, and the ultimate solution to poverty is wealth creation. If people are wealth creators — which they are as workers and business owners and service providers — then limiting population won’t solve India’s poverty problem. On the contrary, it will probably slow down the country’s development, as it deprives India of the creative ideas that those people would have brought to India’s society and economy.

These policies have been tried before with devastating effect. In China, probably the most well-known example, the one child policy has created a social crisis as tens of millions of men are unable to find wives. The population there is aging, with the associated problem that fewer and fewer young, working people must support more and more older people. One child finds himself responsible for two parents and four grandparents, which can hardly be good for any of them. And the preference for boys has led to an epidemic of female infanticide and gender-selective abortion. This last problem is already almost as bad in India as it is in China and this policy will only perpetuate it, making it’s title, the “Kerala Women’s Code,” tragically ironic.

I’m shocked by the disregard that this policy shows for the value of people and by how backward is its analysis of both India’s problems and their solutions. Any policy that would attempt to force sterilization on poor people or abortion on pregnant women should be seen for the dehumanizing policy and gross affront to freedom that it is.