Peace Without Poison

Đỗ Mười, was Vietnam’s leader from 1991 to 1997 and he succeeded in raising the contraceptiveprevalence rate to about 70% and lowering fertility from 3.5 to 2.5 children per woman.Abortions peaked during the 1990s at c. 45%.Lê Khả Phiêu held the highest office in the country from 1997 to 2001 and during his time thecontraceptive prevalence rate climbed to 75% while fertility declined from 2.5 to 2 children perwoman.Nông Đức Mạnh held the highest office in Vietnam from 2001 to 2011, time during which thecontraceptive prevalence rate climbed to nearly 80%, salt fluoridation was introduced across thecountry and fertility declined from 2 to 1.8, where it remains to this day. The abortion ratedecreased rapidly from nearly 40% at the beginning of the decade to just 20% by 2010.The incumbent, Nguyễn Phú Trọng (since January 2011), has stayed the course and has keptVietnam’s total fertility rate at sub-replacement level.Since 2008, when salt fluoridation was introduced across the country, Vietnam has changedcourse in its population control program from overt and legal methods to covert and illegalmethods. This decision was taken because it is far cheaper to combat fertility with chemicalpoisons than it is to do it with contraceptives and abortions and because replacement levelfertility does not coincide with the Vietnamese ideal family size. In an environment of clashingpriorities between what people want and what the government wants with respect to ideal familysize, contraceptives are irrelevant and the government is resorting to forced sterilizationsincreasingly more often to keep fertility below replacement level so it can engineer a populationpeak at 100 million by 2020.The government is also placing its faith in the sterilizing power of fluoride to prevent themoment of conception so that 40% of all pregnancies no longer have to be terminated each yearthrough abortion, as is currently the case and which is a gruesome statistic. The government ofVietnam, in other words, has decided to sacrifice the people’s health and their genetic andintellectual endowment for its demographic objectives.Vietnam’s economic experience mirrors that of other countries that have tackled fertility. OnceVietnam’s total fertility rate began approaching replacement level its GDP per capita began952 | P a g e