Catholic Mexico’s Surprising Birthrate

A bold declaration of Roman Catholic faith is etched in white stones on a hillside above this central Mexican town and visible for miles beyond: “Long Live Mary, Immaculate Queen!”

On a humble side street in the town below, peasant women with their husbands and children in tow are streaming in and out of the brightly painted new Mexfam clinic, a national provider of family health and birth control.

As Pope John Paul II arrives today for his fourth visit to Mexico, a pillar of Catholicism in Latin America, neither the church hierarchy nor the national network of population control organizations is drawing attention to an extraordinary contradiction that has reshaped Mexico:

Nine out of 10 Mexicans call themselves Catholic, yet nearly seven in 10 married women also use some form of birth control--up from three in 10 as recently as 1976--despite the church’s official opposition to any artificial birth control.

Mexico’s successful birth control program, wrought by an unswerving national crusade launched in 1974, has achieved a little-discussed but immensely significant drop in population growth.

Whereas women gave birth to an average of seven children in 1965, the average now is 2.5 children. Put another way, if the birthrate had stayed at 1970 levels, there would have been 5.9 million births in Mexico last year. Instead, there were 2.2 million.

“During the last three decades, the population of Mexico has carried out a silent demographic revolution,” says the annual report of the National Population Council for 1998.

Elsa Ramirez and her husband, Monico Arredondo, illustrate how Mexico achieved this revolution while retaining its Catholic faith. They live in the poor village of Chupadero, in the forgotten northeastern corner of Guanajuato state, where the most successful industry is the annual export of laborers to the United States.

The 800 residents of Chupadero draw water from a single well. Older people survive by growing corn and beans or grazing a few cattle on the barren, cactus-studded hills. Women wash clothes in wooden trays in the dry riverbed, using the scant runoff from the well.

Ramirez, 27, is a volunteer community outreach worker for Mexfam, the nationwide nongovernmental family health organization and the only institutional presence in the village other than the school. In her first year with Mexfam, she has helped 12 women begin using artificial birth control. She is unpaid, other than the bicycle she was given to get around the village more easily.

Married for 10 years, Ramirez and Arredondo have two children, Daniel, 8, and Jonathan, 6. They don’t plan to have more.

Arredondo, 33, leaves each February for Texas, where he works illegally as a builder, and he returns home each November or December. The family lives in the same cramped but tidy two rooms that Arredondo grew up in as one of nine children. This winter he is building new rooms to double the family’s living space.

“I remember there was nothing in this room when I was a child. My father worked hard, but it was never enough for all of us,” Arredondo said. Today the kitchen is filled with basics such as a refrigerator, cupboards of food and a small TV. “Now, since we have [only] two children, even with the little I earn we are able to give them what they need.”

Priest Says Nothing of Family Planning

Ramirez still goes to Mass in the village church each Saturday evening, “and the priest has never said anything” about her work.

She doesn’t proselytize in the tightly knit community, preferring to wait for women to seek her out. Most who do are married and in their late teens or early 20s. Women in their 30s still are having four to six children, and a few have had 10 or more, Ramirez said.

Luis Edgardo Garcia, the Mexfam regional coordinator based at the 6-month-old clinic in San Luis de la Paz, said 47 community workers like Ramirez are spread throughout the northeastern part of Guanajuato state. He hopes to increase the number to 87 within a year. In the county of San Luis alone, he said, there are 500 tiny villages like Chupadero.

Such remote rural communities are the greatest challenge for the government’s 25-year-old program, said Rodolfo Tuiran, secretary-general of the National Population Council. The fastest progress has occurred in the cities, while birthrates have stayed stubbornly higher in the countryside.

Tuiran recalled that Mexican governments once sought to stimulate population growth with slogans such as “to govern is to populate.” Luis Echeverria, elected president in 1970, came from that school. But he soon recognized that, with population growth surging to 3.5% a year, “that meant building a new country every 20 years because the population was doubling every 20 years,” Tuiran said.

At that time, Mexico’s population in the year 2000 was projected to be 145 million. But because of the declining birthrate, the population was 96.5 million last year, and is now growing at 1.8% a year. That means the population is now projected to double every 40 years.

Echeverria made population control a cornerstone of his government, pushing through a constitutional amendment in 1973 enshrining Mexicans’ rights to decide how many children they have.

While launching the first official birth control program in Latin America, Echeverria at the same time improved the state’s historically tense ties with the Catholic Church. The church’s large land holdings and political influence in the 1800s alarmed liberal politicians who sought a secular state. Parishes were nationalized and church prerogatives stripped away, leading to bitter civil wars in the late 1850s and late 1920s.

Even as it chipped away at Catholic taboos on birth control, Echeverria’s government strove to build cordial ties with the church, part of a process that led to the pope’s first visit in 1979 and culminated in major constitutional reforms that legalized the Catholic Church in 1992.

Mexico is widely acknowledged as the Latin country that combines most forcefully government commitment, mass communication and hands-on delivery of birth control services. But the trends are similar across Latin America. The birthrate per 1,000 peaked at 42.11 for the region in 1950. It now stands at 22.87, and by 2050 is projected to fall to 13.72.

Mexico’s birthrate is still slightly ahead of the regional average but, given the current trend, is expected to be lower in 50 years than any Latin country other than Cuba, according to the Latin American Demographic Center in Santiago, Chile.

Alfonso Lopez Juarez, national director of Mexfam, said the two main challenges are serving rural areas and reducing unwanted teenage pregnancies, which number 500,000 a year in Mexico compared with 800,000 in the United States, which has about 2 1/2 times the population. Abortion is illegal in Mexico, and both the government and organizations such as Mexfam are officially opposed to it.

Lopez Juarez added that 80% of all babies here are born to the poorest 20% of the population, most of which lives in the countryside. Thus the emphasis on rural areas, where “the majority of priests who are out in the field of battle don’t object to family planning,” he said. “And of the hundreds of thousands of women whom we have attended, they are all Catholics--and none of them has the slightest problem of conscience in using our service.”

Church Has Never Relaxed Official Stand

The church hierarchy in Mexico has never relaxed its formal opposition to birth control. Msgr. Abelardo Alvarado Alcantara, secretary-general of the Mexican Catholic Bishops Conference, said in an interview: “The church does not support, as it did in the past, the view that couples had to have all the children God might give them. . . . The church also says that responsible couples need to decide with freedom and in good conscience the number of children they will have and the spacing of those children.”

But he added, “The church will continue condemning the use of contraceptives to impede natural fertility. . . .

“Birth control is not the solution to poverty, as some insist,” Alvarado said. “We see that despite these programs, the population isn’t living any better. Education is the only road for the country to leave poverty, not birth control.”

Regional coordinators for Mexfam, who held a national workshop at the new San Luis clinic last week, said that, in most cases, clergymen do not challenge family planning work. But family planning organizations also seek to avoid fights with the church or with the small but vocal anti-contraception movement.

For example, among the battery of birth control options Mexfam offers its patients is the rhythm method--abstinence from sex around the time of the woman’s ovulation--a natural technique that is sanctioned by the church. While it notes that such methods are less reliable, Mexfam hands out necklaces of colored plastic beads to women who would rather count days of the month than use artificial birth control devices.

Observer Sees Evidence of a Negotiated Accord

Anthropologist Roger Bartra, who studies church issues, told the newspaper Reforma that while the church has never publicly accepted birth control, “I do think the government and the church have managed to negotiate a voluntarily weakened role for the church, an acceptance of the reality and that there’s no other way out.”

By far the largest family planning provider is the government social security system, vast enough to reach millions of mothers and offer them birth control services that, by law, are free of charge. Nonprofits such as Mexfam, which work closely and effectively with the government, sometimes charge a nominal fee for their services.

The system was attacked in the mid-1990s for purportedly forcing women to be sterilized without their consent, often right after delivery. Social security officials say such allegations sometimes surfaced after women who agreed to be sterilized later were confronted by angry husbands, prompting the women to say they were coerced. A formal written consent procedure now in place appears to have minimized charges of high-pressure tactics.

Still, the strategy of both government-run and private clinics is to offer birth control information to every woman of childbearing age who comes in for any care.

Virginia Leon, 39, was recovering at the San Luis clinic from a caesarean delivery of her 10th child; her eldest is 22 years old. The family lives on a ranch in a small village outside town. After the delivery, Leon was sterilized, a decision she and her husband made because she is constantly in poor health “and there isn’t enough food.”

“In the parish . . . now the father says, ‘If one has a lot of children, you can use something, because if you die in birth, who will take care of your children?’ ” she said.

Dr. Jezabel Benitez, 28-year-old resident physician at the San Luis clinic, said she was the 12th child in her family. She has one child “and we’ll have two, not more.”

“Some women do come on Friday and get an IUD put in, then they go to Mass on Sunday and come back on Monday to ask that it be taken out. I’ve had two or three such cases,” she said. “But it seems that many priests do say, ‘Take care of yourselves as you think best.’

“The women say they believe in God, but they can’t see how God sent them here to raise eight or 10 hungry children,” particularly since women increasingly must work outside the home to make ends meet, Benitez added.

Foundation Laid for Cultural Change

Beyond the one-to-one clinic work, nationwide sex education and family planning campaigns have laid the foundation for the cultural change.

Tuiran, of the National Population Council, said some of the most effective mass-communication tools were popular prime-time television soap operas of the 1970s and ‘80s, in which stars played characters who used birth control.

In schools, sex education courses emphasizing family planning have been offered to increasingly younger age groups, now starting at 11 and 12 years old.

In the huge Mexico City suburb of Nezahualcoyotl, Mexfam psychologist Hugo Sanchez said his team lectures on family health issues at schools, unions, hospitals and government agencies. “The change I’ve noticed is there is more access to forums where we can share our message. Before, we had to almost beg for an opportunity,” he said.

Nezahualcoyotl, or Neza as everyone calls it, is home to 3 million people, many of them poor migrants from rural states such as Oaxaca and Guerrero.

“These are diverse cultures with their own values and their own ways of practicing sexuality,” Sanchez added. “So being willing to use protection is a huge change given where they come from.”

Alejandro and Alma Rosa Varela are a typical modern, urban Mexican couple. They were at the Neza clinic to procure birth control just after the arrival of their daughter, Ayare. They also have a 5-year-old.

“We planned this second one from the start,” Alejandro Varela said. “We are planning because of the economic situation. We waited until we had sufficient means, and for Alejandro Jr. to be more self-sufficient.”

Alejandro runs a small tortilla shop, and Alma Rosa is a teacher who gets three months’ maternity leave.

“Our grandparents didn’t have any controls, and they needed children to work in the fields and in the house,” Alejandro said. “For us, the reality is different. We want to have children we can take care of well. We want to do better for our children.”

* POPE’S TRIP: Papal trip to Mexico has generated less fervor in the Los Angeles area than expected. B1

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Impact of Birth Control

Family size in Mexico has shrunk, particularly after the government began a birth-control campaign in the 1970s.

* Use of birth control among married women of childbearing age:

1976: 30.2%

1982: 47.7%

1987: 52.7%

1992: 63.1%

1998: 68.8%

2000: 70.2%*

****

Average number of children in Mexican households:

2.6*

* projected

Source: National Population Council