If one Jamaican social worker has her way, this will be the country’s new mantra. By Monica Dystant’s thinking, only rich people should be having babies. Ok, maybe this is overstating her case, but her commentary yesterday in the Gleaner is just shy of this declaration.

There has been talk lately about people having multiple children with multiple fathers and how they cannot afford to take care of them. These children are then subject to abuse and neglect. There are so many illogical leaps and stereotypes here it makes my head hurt. Such as: poor people are not smart enough to use birth control, or they cannot afford it, so they just keep reproducing. Poor people are more prone to abuse and neglect their children. Poor people are not as able as others to stave off sexual urges.

Why so much poor bashing? Why do people feel it is ok to marginalize this population further and make horrific, illogical and unfair assumptions?

True, there are definitely issues of child abuse and neglect here in Jamaica, but they are absolutely not confined to one socioeconomic group. I think the conversation would be a lot more successful if the dialogue stops creating such a dichotomy between poor and rich, us and them, educated and uneducated. Better to approach it as a societal issue. Ask families why they have so many children. Ask families what their financial plans are. But certainly a Chinese style law regulating the amount of children a family has is not the way to go. If that would be the case, would rich families be allowed to have 10 children? I can’t imagine such a control system working, let alone being respective of basic human rights. (I do acknowledge that abuse and neglect are serious problems here in Jamaica, but addressing those issues takes the hard work of education, counselling and support as well as healing the ailing economy.)