Venezuela’s food shortages, inflation and crumbling medical sector have become such a source of anguish that a growing number of young women are reluctantly opting for sterilizations rather than face the hardship of pregnancy and child-rearing.

Traditional contraceptives like condoms or birth control pills have virtually vanished from store shelves, pushing women towards the hard-to-reverse surgery.

“Having a child now means making him suffer,” said Milagros Martinez, waiting on a park bench on a recent morning ahead of her sterilization at a nearby Caracas municipal health center.

The 28-year-old butcher from the poor outskirts of Caracas decided on the operation after having an unplanned second child because she could not find birth control pills.

In the Philippines, the average number of children per household is 6 where the father has no job and the mother takes more than 3 odd jobs: laundry woman, street vendor and more.   Young children coming from a big family are forced to work at a young age to support a whole family.

Other factors affecting the increasing poverty level in the Philippines are:

• low wages of teachers and nurses and rest of workforce
• poor educational system in elementary and high school, families have to opt for expensive private schools
• traffic and poor transportation making it hard for hard working college students who are also taking on odd jobs to send themselves to college in the absence of student loan system
• expensive food items, crowded homes, poor living situation, lack of government funding in health care and social welfare and more
• absence of condoms/family planning support, air pollution from cars/factories/smoking