Faced with the biggest population timebomb in the history of mankind, Asia's governments have rarely shied away from imposing themselves on the intensely private matter of birth control, but times may be changing. The region has three of the world's four most populous nations - China, India and Indonesia - and policies in many countries have run the gamut from involuntary abortion to forced sterilisation and infanticide.
Such measures may soon be consigned to a grim past, and perhaps one day in the not-too-distant future Asia may bid a complete farewell to its population policies, as family sizes will be regulated not by fiat, but by the market.
"Child-rearing has become so expensive that some believe it will decline of its own accord," says Nigel Thomas, a population expert at Cardiff University.
Raising a family in urban China, for example, is now a crushing financial burden, due especially to soaring tuition fees, and many couples would simply be driven to ruin by two children.
While the market forces make their contribution to the changing demographics of the region, government employees are also gradually becoming more pragmatic in their daily work.
Officials across the region are discovering that persuasion is more efficient than coercion, especially when addressing young couples with dramatically better education than their parents.
Tina Agustina, an Indonesian family planning expert, says women in her country used to have 5.6 children on average, but that number has declined to 2.9, arguably without anyone being made to act against their own wishes.
"Midwives are the most popular public and private dispensers of modern contraceptives, about 50 percent of which are supplied through government facilities," she says. Even China - with a population of more than 1.3 billion - is introducing changes to its notorious one-child policy, allowing more flexibility according to local conditions.
"The rules will definitely be relaxed over time," says Guo Youde, a demographer at Shanghai's Fudan University. "Even now, local governments are allowed greater leeway in making adjustments based on their own population structure."
Some prosperous Chinese cities allow two children under special circumstances, and they are little by little shortening the time before the second birth can take place.
Still, this does not mean the one-child policy is about to be scrapped, local experts agree.
The generation born in the 1970s, members of a mini-baby boom taking place then, have still not left child-rearing age, and the reins cannot be loosened lest they produce more new recruits for China's growing army of unemployed.
China is currently paying the price of disastrous population policies in the past.
In the 1950s, when China's population was around 582 million population, the country's Communist rulers believed people were a strategic asset, and women were encouraged to have as many children as they could possibly manage.
"If we hadn't had the policies of the 1950s, population growth might have followed a more natural path," says Guo. "But it's precisely because of those policies that we can't afford not to have a one-child policy."
The human cost of China's stern policies have been staggering, rights groups argue, claiming that family planners occasionally adopt measures that in a courtroom would hover between manslaughter and murder, such as forced abortions and infanticide.
In April 2001 in Harbin, north-east Heilongjiang province, a mother who was heavily pregnant with her fourth child underwent a forcible abortion in hospitable. But the foetus survived so a hospital director ordered the girl be dumped outside to die of neglect.
The girl survived because nurses hadn't the heart to carry out the order.
LEARNING FROM PAST MISTAKES: China is not the only country that has been criticised for going overboard, with overzealous enforcement leading to severe rights infringements.
So has India, which had just 230 million people at the time of independence in 1947 but now looks set to overtake China by 2030 with 1.4 billion citizens, according to the latest United Nations forecasts.
When the South Asian giant passed the one billion mark in May 2000, then prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee treated the event as something bordering on national tragedy.
"This is a serious matter that is both cause for concern and introspection," he said. "Concern over the impact that a runaway population growth is bound to have on the nation's economic, natural and other resources, introspection over where we went wrong and how we can stabilise our population."
In response to the population explosion, Indian officials have resorted to heavy-handed family planning tactics.
Some Indian states have adopted the two-child norm which bars people who exceed that limit from using various government facilities and even stops them contesting local body elections.
According to A.R. Nanda, executive director of the Population Foundation of India, a non-governmental research body, it is the wrong approach.
"It is an authoritarian approach and may bring back memories of the dreadful era of forcible sterilizations," he says. "The target-free approach is the best, but the states are ignoring it."
The Supreme Court last year upheld a decision by a lower court to disqualify a village council member in the north-west Indian state of Haryana for violating the region's two-child norm, even though the norm is not legally binding.
Indonesia, by contrast, may offer clues to how the worst excesses of population policy can be avoided, although this Southeast Asian country with 240 million citizens has had to learn from its mistakes.
Early on, officials were accused of promoting contraceptives without due safety testing, forcing women to use intrauterine devices without their consent, and selectively targeting minorities for birth control.
But Siswanto Wilopo, deputy chief of the Family Planning Co-ordination Agency, says such coercive measures were abandoned in the 1990s following the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo.
"Our success is attributed to the support of all stakeholders - the government, non-governmental organisations, religious leaders, the military and health workers," Wilopo says.
The idea that support of broad sectors in society is key to successful population policies is confirmed in other parts of the region.
Pakistan, which has only had a population policy in place since 2002, had difficulties getting people to use contraceptives, until religious groups stopped arguing it was un-Islamic.
"The contraceptive use which was 12 percent in 1991 has increased to 36 percent, a three-fold increase," says Minhajul Haque, programme manager for the independent Population Council.
It is hoped the policy will soon begin to have an impact on a country whose population has risen rapidly to 162 million, with almost 40 per cent of those aged under 15.
CHURCH OPPOSITION: The impoverished Philippines has the highest birthrate in south-east Asia which could see its 84 million population double within the next 30 years, yet contraception remains a taboo in this predominantly Roman Catholic nation.
The church still wields considerable political influence especially in areas affecting moral values. Divorce is illegal and the use of contraceptives is opposed in favour of what the clergy calls "responsible family planning".
The government has left the issue to local governments, with some supporting the use of contraceptives such as the pill and condoms while others stick to the ruling of the church.
Analysts say that without a comprehensive national approach to family planning, which includes the use of contraceptives, the Philippines is destined to remain poor and economically weak.
They add that the government's goal of reducing population growth from the current annual 2.3 percent to 1.9 percent and the poverty level from 34 percent to 18 percent by 2010 is unrealistic.
Even the government's own Population Commission has warned that unless serious efforts are made to reduce the birth rate the Philippines could see its population double by 2035.
Mia Ventura, the commission's deputy executive director, says she has serious doubts whether the government can reduce population growth by 2010.
With more than 80 percent of the population Catholic any move to introduce family planning which offers free choice of birth control methods, will bring the administration into conflict with the church.
In the past, politicians like then-president Fidel Ramos, a Protestant, have come under direct attack by the bishops for endorsing birth control.
According to Ventura, 51 percent of the population don't use any form of contraception with condoms used by less than one percent and the pill by only 13 percent.
A recent study by the University of the Philippines (UP) School of Economics showed that the Philippines managed to reduce its birth rate from three percent in the 1970s to 2.4 percent in the 1990s with little change since.
Thailand and Indonesia, on the other hand, both had similar rates of population growth in the 70s but managed to reduce it to 1.4 percent and 1.5 percent respectively, the study said.
At the same time both countries have managed to reduce the level of poverty where in Thailand it is less than 10 percent of the population while in Indonesia it is 18.2 percent.
The Asian Development Bank has said the Philippine economy will need to grow by at least six percent annually for the next 10 years to make any serious impact on reducing the country's level of poverty. The economy is expected to grow by less than five percent this year.
The UP study showed that without a comprehensive national population policy economic growth in the Philippines will be stunted.
Peter Wallace, an economic and political consultant to multi-national corporations in the Philippines, says: "The Philippine problem is that its population is growing not at a fast rate but at an excessively fast rate. A rate the necessary support structures such as housing, education and health care can't keep up with. "There simply isn't enough money in the national budget to go around." The fact that the Philippines nurses a massive debt burden doesn't help.
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