despite all the bragging and the political acclamations of economic growth, the figures are pathetic: over half a million people on starvation level ($ 1/day or less) and 15 million in poverty. only 19 provinces out of 81 productive enough to meet expenses (they are feeding the rest). children almost dying of hunger, slumming in one room tenements with numerous siblings along with parents and elder relatives, housing prospects bleak etc.

tv's broadcast dramas of starving families: "i am jobless. i bring home the bread to my eight children. they are cold, they are naked, i can't send them to school". sometimes we are not given a number for children but we can observe an uncountable number of urchins climbing on laps, tables, chairs, fighting in the background and so on.

how touchy! until one stops to ask how many many mouths can an unskilled, uneducated even unwashed parent with no professional acquis to his name hope to feed so that he does not even bother to use rubber while gratifying the only urge that leaving ungratified can improve his lot?

pity-mongering is cheap, so everyone buys it. yet in the "orient" rationality is so subjugated that people can perform acts that the simplest animal refrains from instinctively. higher mammals like whales are suspected of committing mass suicide when faced with environmental pressures that threaten to lower the group's "life standards".

the excuse behind making so many kids is "god gives the aliment for the life he creates".
the "survival" oriented reality is, the investment of the poor is their progeny. the idea is that, children will look after parents when they are old. the male offsprings are therefore more valuable, they are the providers.

hooked on a thwarted islamic ideology (*), a good majority of turks think there is safety in numbers. if they are right, there is a corollary to that theorem: there is poverty, there is misery in numbers, too.
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(*) islam's not the only faith to blame. labor intense or under-populated regimes (as the israelis) traditionally abhorred the the idea of being left without enough manpower as soldiers and/or soil tillers. anti-contraception began (officially, at least) with judaism which claimed that any wasted semen might fritter away the messiah to be born. an idea grasped by other monotheistic religions, especially by islamic societies that lived either on agriculture or military campaigns and pillaging.