Posted on 06/30/2003 7:42:54 PM PDT by Lorianne
Marquelis is one of 40 men who in the last year and a half have had vasectomies in the humble towns of El Tigre and Rio Cedro on Colombia's Caribbean coast.
In return for undergoing the operations, the men receive plots of land from a 54-year-old movie producer who sees sterilization as a way to reduce poverty. The man, who declined to be identified, pays for the operations.
While female sterilization campaigns in Latin America have met with outrage in the past, Colombia's vasectomy-for-land scheme is cheered by locals.
The program's sponsor, who himself has two daughters and has had a vasectomy, speaks about the procedure with passion.
"The tyranny which I am fighting is irresponsible procreation, unsettling the life of all Colombians and everyone in the Third World," the producer, who lives in Bogota but vacations in the area, told Reuters.
He declined to use his real name for fear of being kidnapped by Colombian leftist rebels, who use ransom money to fund their four-decade-old guerrilla war. Instead, he asked to be identified as William Tell after the Swiss patriot who was ordered to shoot a small apple off his young son's head.
(Excerpt) Read more at asia.reuters.com ...
The simple fact of the matter is that as a way to stamp out poverty, this is doomed to fail. If you sterilized half the men in the world, the other half would just have to do double duty, but the birth rate could be sustained. If you sterilized half the women in the world, you'd cut the birth rate in half. It's a simple matter of biology.
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