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Case study of family planning in Thailand

How to make family planning fun

The title of the video sure captures your imagination: How Mr Condom Made Thailand A Better Place. A talk by Mechai Viravaidya, Thailand's Mr Condom, uploaded onto TED.com recently details how Thailand fought high birth rates and population growth with family planning, by involving everyone in the community from the religious leaders down to schoolchildren, through no-holds-barred methods like sex education in schools and even seemingly inane events like condom blowing competitions.

This talk is a very entertaining and hilarious talk, sprinkled with slightly PG-rated jokes, but it is worth watching to learn of alternative ways to promote family planning other than state-directed heavy-handed initiatives such as the One Child Policy of China, which might have been justifiable based on certain grounds but was nevertheless rather draconian and too government-directed.

From the talk, one seems to have the impression that condoms are available everywhere, and that even little children seem to have contact with condoms. Then some might have doubts about these initiatives. Many Catholics do not believe in condoms because they believe children are a gift of God, while many conservatives feel that sex education or promotion of condoms encourages promiscuous behaviour and experimentation, which would wreck the institution of marriage. These certainly are valid concerns, but I do not believe that a problem goes away by burying one's head in the sand. It probably worked for Thailand because the majority of people are Buddhists, and the religion's stand is generally neutral / encouraging on use of contraceptives and family planning. And especially important in the fight against AIDS is the use of condoms. It would be hard to reduce AIDS transmission rates without promoting the use of condoms, as abstinence is a very hard virtue to promote and there is a need to protect the women who are exposed to these diseases as a result of their promiscuous husbands.