Baby no.7 billion, what’s your number?

PHILIPPINES welcomed shortly before midnight yesterday  what could be the world’s seven billionth person: a healthy 5.5-pound girl born in a government hospital in Manila.

Health officials and a representative from the United Nations went to the Jose Fabella Memorial Medical Center after learning of the birth of Danica Camacho.

Danica was born to Camille Dalura and Florante Camacho of Antipolo City at about 11:55 p.m. Sunday, according to a report of radio dzBB.

View the baby  here

Health Secretary Enrique Ona said the department still has to submit the baby’s name and time of birth to the World Health Organization to see if Danica is indeed the world’s seven billionth baby.

With Ona at the hospital was Population Commission head Tomas Osias and a UN representative.

The Department of Health gave the baby and her parents memberships to the national Philippine health insurance corporation, and a scholarship from a computer school.

Little Danica joins a world apprehensive about the future. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon in a message marking World Population Day last July, said the expected 7 billionth  baby will be “born into our world of complexity and contradiction.”

“We have enough food for everyone, yet nearly a billion go hungry. We have the means to eradicate many diseases, yet they continue to spread.

We have the gift of a rich natural environment, yet it remains subject to daily assault and exploitation. All people of conscience dream of peace, yet too much of the world is in conflict and steeped in armaments,” he said.

Monsignor Pedro Quitorio III, Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) media office director thinks the “weird”  publicity over the baby could be  a “ploy” to shine the light on the Philippines’ “high” birth rate according to pro-population control groups’ standards.

The 7-billionth baby could just be used as mascot for the UN’s and WHO’s population control drive, especially now that the Church is succeeding in preventing what it calls a contraceptive culture and mentality from taking root.

“In all my 15 years of RH Bill and family and life advocacy, I have never seen so many politicians and other people opposing it (RH bill),” Monsignor Quitorio explained. He cited anti-RH Bill Facebook pages that have at least 120,000 known members, many of them young people.

He notes reports of a “demographic winter,” and the worries Chinese, European and other Western countries are facing from lack of children, siblings, family and workers. Baby Danica is a “welcome gift from God,” regardless her number.

Meanwhile, for the curious, BBC has developed a program to estimate one’s number in the world population, accessible here

With report from ucanews.com