A Crusader for Birth Control in Mexico

She is one of Mexico’s foremost birth-control crusaders--and a practicing Catholic.

And according to Guadalupe Arizpe de De la Vega (Lupe to her friends), those descriptions needn’t be contradictions in terms.

De la Vega is the president and founder of FEMAP, Mexico’s Federation of Private Family Planning Assns., a network of clinics that has grown from having an estimated 50,000 Mexican women use birth control methods in 1982 to having about 360,000 use them now. That’s more than a 700% increase in the last five years.

Efforts Began in 1973

The wife of a successful businessman and the mother of three grown children, she began in 1973, working with poor female factory workers in her home town of Juarez. Her organization has grown from a single family planning and maternity clinic to a network of 27 affiliated programs in 34 cities throughout Mexico.

At a Tuesday evening program presented for the Southern California Population Crisis Committee, a year-old branch of the Washington-based Population Crisis Committee, De la Vega did not mention the Catholic church or its teachings on birth control.

But in a question-and-answer session following her talk she was asked if her group’s work might eventually be denounced by the Catholic church.

“I don’t have any problem with the bishop. He’s a very good friend of mine. Our bishop has never opposed our (family planning) cause,” she told a group of about 35 listeners gathered at the Louis Newman Galleries in Beverly Hills for the fourth general meeting of the Southern California Population Crisis Committee.

A striking, stylishly dressed blond with Princess Grace poise, De la Vega said that “even priests send people to the clinic to have tubal ligations” and that nuns have done volunteer work at a FEMAP maternity clinic “delivering babies.”

“Bishops and priests understand the tremendous need for family planning,” she continued, explaining that there may be less opposition from the Catholic church to birth control in her country because abortion is illegal in Mexico and it is not advocated in FEMAP programs or clinics. “We tell them the only thing you can do to prevent abortions is family planning.”

She added that there is growing acceptance of her group’s clinics because they also provide women with much-needed prenatal, postnatal and basic health care, including nutritional instruction and psychological counseling.

Variety of Services

If her clinics provided services “like Planned Parenthood in the United States”--in other words, if her clinics focused chiefly on birth control issues--”nobody (in Mexico) would go,” De la Vega ventured.

As a result of helping Mexican women to have healthier pregnancies and babies, FEMAP is then able to present information to the women about birth control options, she said. Currently, the most popular birth control methods used by FEMAP clients are (in descending order): the pill, condoms, tubal ligations, IUDs and local methods.

Marilyn Brant Stuart, who chairs the Southern California Population Crisis Committee, described De la Vega as “madame dynamo of Mexico . . . a champion to the entire family planning movement.”

Stuart also informed the audience that because of De la Vega’s success, her work is frequently studied by family planning experts from around the world and that her most recent foreign visitors hailed from Turkey and Greece.

Emphasizing that Mexico’s population/economic problems are problems that the rest of the world has a stake in, De la Vega said that “demographic and environmental tensions increase each day and have a strong impact on natural resources. Increasingly, they determine the quality of life of our planet.”

Shared Issues

Then she zoomed in on the importance, for both countries, of the relationship between the United States and Mexico: “Many issues of great significance such as migration, population growth, pollution . . . trade, tourism, education, poverty and political changes challenge the well-being of our countries as never before. Social disorders in Mexico brought about by a socioeconomic crisis would trigger distress in the United States.”

But, she maintained, there have been considerable improvements in recent years. As a result of government and private efforts to improve family planning in Mexico, she said, the country’s population growth rate has decreased from 3.5% in 1976 to 2.4% in 1986. In addition, according to De la Vega’s figures, the average Mexican family in the Northern states now has between 2.0 and 2.5 children; an average family in the Southern states has between 5.0 and 5.5 children. “It used to be in 1980, families in the Southern states had an average of 7.6 children. And in Northern states like Baja they had about 3.9 children in 1980.”

De la Vega noted that Mexico’s national population program is recognized internationally as one of the best in the world, having been granted a United Nations population control award in 1985. But even so, she cautioned, population projections are ominous.

“In 1940, Mexico’s population was 20 million and by 1986 it had reached 80 million inhabitants. Demographic projections estimate that Mexico will have a population of 103 million by the year 2,000. Mexico City is projected to have a population of 32 million by the year 2,000.” (In 1986 the population of metropolitan Mexico City was estimated to be 17 million.)

Serious Problems for U.S.

Or as Southern California Population Crisis Committee director-at-large Ben Lohrie put it, all this could mean serious problems for the United States, particularly for Southern California.

“Up until now, they (illegal Mexican immigrants) have had the safety of El Norte. That’s closed down now. You can’t hire illegal aliens anymore,” said Lohrie, a physicist. “She (De la Vega) is a candle in the darkness. There’s nothing she can do to change the arithmetic of the situation (the projected population for Mexico). Once an exponential curve is set in motion, there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

Lohrie expressed these concerns and others to De la Vega after her presentation and she reassured him that despite the population projections and Mexico’s current economic woes given the severe drop in oil prices, there is no reason to be disheartened.

“We do have to start somewhere. It’s not that pessimistic,” she said. “Nobody is dying of hunger in Mexico like they are in India. Seventy-five percent of our people have access to water and most have access to electricity . . . A bigger (world population) problem is China. And how many times in history have people predicted that trouble would happen and they’ve been wrong?”

What’s more, De la Vega later pointed out that the efforts of psychological counselors at FEMAP are likely to change more than just family size for many clients. “The women learn a philosophy that makes them feel they have the ability to change their circumstances,” she said. “They learn to become the architects of their own lives.”