Male contraceptives in Honduras

A short article in La Prensa on February 2, 2018, noted that the first lot of 10,000 male contraceptive vaccines had arrived in a San Pedro Sula hospital. Does this help the poor and especially poor women?

I have very mixed feelings about contraceptives, which are too complicated to explain in a blog post. But this is not a post about the ethics of artificial contraceptives. (Please use another forum to debate these issues.)

It’s not that I am opposed to careful and thoughtful limitation of children. The Catholic Church, though opposed officially to the use of artificial contraceptives, is not opposed to limitation.

Though I am an only child, I wonder whether many efforts to limit the number of children in the first world is due to a fear of scarcity and a desire for an all too comfortable life for children. I do have some serious questions about the desire to have tiny families, especially when it is connected with maintaining a standard of living which most of the world cannot afford.

Many of the people around me here in Plan Grande have between three and six children. But I do know of families with ten or more. But I also remember when I began to work in Iowa in 1983 that I met a few university students who were one of more than ten children in their family. I remember one family of 18 children. The common element was that the families, in Honduras and in Iowa, grow up in the countryside, where children can be an asset, not a threat to family finances.

But the second paragraph of the article is what alerted me to what I feel may be something very subtly insidious, which is symptomatic of serious problems here in Honduras.

Asimismo informó: serán prioridad los hombres que tengan demandas alimenticias (embargos) luego todo aquel que ya tenga más de 5 hijos, concluyendo con los que tengan ingresos abajo del salario mínimo.

“The priority will be men who have nutritional demands (indigestion), then all who already have five children, and finally those who have income less that minimal salary.”

The poor will, supposedly, benefit. And society will have fewer poor children, fewer mouths to feed, fewer demands on the societal evil of the concentration of wealth and power in a minority. (Honduras has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in the world.) There will be fewer poor and the super-rich can continue to eat and control as much as they want.

There is also another insidious element. In a macho culture, where rape, sexual violence, and marital rape are not uncommon, this is another way to let the male off the hook. He can have sex without consequences (children); he can use women without having to be responsible for his deeds (no children possible).

Something is very wrong. In my mind, discrimination against the poor, social inequality, machismo, and male irresponsibility are being furthered by this type of publicity for male contraceptives.

These and other evils won’t be solved by prohibitions of this new contraceptive. A real societal change is necessary.

I have seen the roots of this. The other day I came across a couple getting married. They have one child together but she has two other children from a man she lived with for a while. The husband is accepting and supporting these two children as his own, since their father doesn’t. This is a sign of hope amid the irresponsibility of some males.

But much more in needed – most of all a change of conscience in the rich and in men, together with a change in laws and customs that denigrate women and the poor.

Now that would be a good Lenten penitential practice.

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Note: I translated embargos as indigestion, though I'm not sure that this is accurate.