Thailand welfare through contraception in the 70’s

LAST UPDATE: MAY 22, 2017

TED talk by Mechai Viravaidya, “Mr Condom”, explaining how he engineered a population control for Thailand in the 1970’s to improve public health and raise standards of living for the Thais.

Transcript

0:15 – Welcome to Thailand. Now, when I was a young man — 40 years ago, the country was very, very poorwith lots and lots and lots of people living in poverty. We decided to do something about it, but we didn’t begin with a welfare program or a poverty reduction program. But we began with a family-planning program, following a very successful maternal child health activity, sets of activities. So basically, no one would accept family planning if their children didn’t survive. So the first step: get to the children, get to the mothers, and then follow up with family planning. Not just child mortality alone, you need also family planning. Now let me take you back as to why we needed to do it.

1:00 – In my country, that was the case in 1974. Seven children per family — tremendous growth at 3.3 percent. There was just no future. We needed to reduce the population growth rate. So we said, “Let’s do it.” The women said, “We agree. We’ll use pills, but we need a doctor to prescribe the pills,” and we had very, very few doctors. We didn’t take no as an answer; we took no as a question. We went to the nurses and the midwives, who were also women, and did a fantastic job at explaining how to use the pill. That was wonderful, but it covered only 20 percent of the country.

1:35 – What do we do for the other 80 percent — leave them alone and say, “Well, they’re not medical personnel.” No, we decided to do a bit more. So we went to the ordinary people that you saw. Actually, below that yellow sign — I wish they hadn’t wiped that, because there was “Coca-Cola” there. We were so much bigger than Coca-Cola in those days. And no difference, the people they chose were the people we chose. They were well-known in the community, they knew that customers were always right, and they were terrific, and they practiced their family planning themselves. So they could supply pills and condoms throughout the country, in every village of the country. So there we are. We went to the people who were seen as the cause of the problem to be the solution. Wherever there were people — and you can see boats with the women, selling things — here’s the floating market selling bananas and crabs and also contraceptives — wherever you find people, you’ll find contraceptives in Thailand.

2:31 – And then we decided, why not get to religion because in the Philippines, the Catholic Church was pretty strong, and Thai people were Buddhist. We went to them and they said, “Look, could you help us?” I’m there — the one in blue, not the yellow — holding a bowl of holy water for the monk to sprinkle holy water on pills and condoms for the sanctity of the family. And this picture was sent throughout the country. So some of the monks in the villages were doing the same thing themselves. And the women were saying, “No wonder we have no side-effects. It’s been blessed.” That was their perception.