Fathoming low births

re: "Fertility needs urgent steps" (BP, Editorial, September 18, 2023) 

Dear editor,

Having "rightly", as the Bangkok Post puts it, "identified the country's low fertility rate issue as a pressing concern," Public Health Minister Dr Cholnan Srikaew should perhaps consider that people who choose not to have children are responding responsibly to the reality embodied in the government that Dr Cholnan serves.

When people cannot even vote in the government they want, that helplessness before blatant injustice protected by law is hardly a world into which to bring innocent children. No more was the Thailand forged by the previous government, itself now part of Dr Cholnan's unwanted coalition, when the birthrate plummeted. When a mother's children are imprisoned under morally indefensible law merely for the peaceful expression of honest opinion that allegedly offends against tradition holding back progress, responsible people will think twice before bearing them only to cast their own children into a world of such systemic, legally blessed inequality.

Whilst mentioning the need for a nation "where children can live and prosper," the Post's focus on the monetary value of children itself reveals a reason to think twice before producing children. Why would good people create children merely to serve the economic interests represented by ruling Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin and former Prime Ministers Prayut Chan-o-cha and Thaksin Shinawatra, whose factories and power bases demand fresh fodder? 

 Felix Qui 

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on September 19, 2023, under the title "Fathoming low births " at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2649374/drug-vows-are-hot-air