By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
The Vietnamese government’s stringent two-child policy is forcing scores of Catholics in that nation to pay hefty fines for remaining faithful to Church teaching about the use of artificial contraception.
According to a report by Spero News, Catholics are struggling to follow Church teaching in the wake of a population control program that does not allow families to have more than two children. Launched in 1994, families with more than two children have to pay rice to the government as a fine.
Families who have reached the two-child limit are asked to use artificial contraception or to undergo vasectomies free of charge.
One woman, Anna Pham Thi The, 50, has seven daughters aged 2-29 years. She produces rice alcohol and raises pigs and says she is willing to be fined for having more children because her husband wants a son.
Father Joseph Nguyen Van Chanh, Huong Toan parish priest, said 90 percent of his 1,200 parishioners have agreed to pay fines as a way to be faithful to Church teaching. Local Catholics are taught natural family planning methods during marriage preparation courses, he noted.
The pressure can be too much for some, however. Catherine Pham Thi Thanh, 44, said that since 1996, she has been fined a total of 3,800 kilograms of rice for having six children.
A poor woman who produces rice alcohol and raises pigs to support her family, Catherine said she was fined 300 kilograms of rice for her third child, 600 kilograms for the fourth, 900 kilograms for the fifth and 2,000 kilograms of rice for the sixth. Unfortunately, her family makes an annual profit of only 700 kilgrams of rice from their 1,000 square-meter farmland that the government grants them.
In 2007, she finally agreed to use an intrauterine device to save her family from having to pay 3,800 kilograms of rice if she were to have a seventh child.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “‘every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible’ is intrinsically evil.”
Eight to 10 percent of Vietnam’s 86 million people are believed to be Roman Catholic.
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