I have many friends have joined the children sponsorship program of the World Vision to help poor children in third world countries. You just have to donate $35 a month, World Vision will pool together donation from many donors to provide food, shelter and education to the poor children. In return, you will get a photo of the child you are sponsoring and once a while the child will write thank you letters to you. Indisputably, donation to World Vision is charitable act that will gives you a good feeling and makes you think that you are a good person. World Vision’s intention is good, it make difference to the life of those children they help, but I always question is it the best way to solve the world’s poverty problem. The poor children grow up, give birth to more children that they can support, leave them in the hand of World Vision, and turn into a vicious circle.
The poor children the World Vision helping are extra population in the earth that we don’t want and we don’t need. They should not be born in the first place. If the parents cannot raise the children, then they have no right to bring them to this world. We already have too many people in the third world countries and the number is raising. If we want to fix the problem, we have to fix the root cause, not just treating the symptoms. Instead of running World Vision like charity, we should support charity that carry out birth control in third world countries. The goal is to minimize the number of children suffering in poor countries. It would be much more cost effective to prevent those suffering children come to this world in the first place.
Just imagine if we spend that $35 on birth control up front, we can prevent how many potential suffering children draining World Vision’s resources. If World Vision can spend the same amount of donation on a smaller number of poor children, each of them can get better education and service. They can learn skills to earn a proper living to support their next generation and left the vicious circle. Just like treating diseases, finding the prevention is always better than finding the cure, stop the poor children coming is better than raising poor children. The only problem is that I haven’t come across a charity origination focus on birth control in third world countries yet.