Too much of a good thing?

When we moved here in the 1993, Uganda's population was HALF what it is today.  We are living in a country whose growth rate is among the handful of the highest in the WORLD, exploding before our eyes.  The good side of this is that Ugandans value children, value family.  The bad side is, that like any good thing, children (or more accurately multitudes of children) should not become the goal of life.  Only with a goal of God Himself in the center of life can we avoid country-wide indifference to the plight of children and killing of the almost-born (America) . . . or country-wide pursuit of fertility at the expense of the already-born (Uganda).  Every culture has its blind spots, certainly. In the US we accept limits on some good things (consumption of red meat or ice cream, for instance) but not others (pursuit of sexual gratification).  This week I sat at the bedside of a smiling but starving baby, whom we were trying to rescue with milk.  Her mother's lethargy and reduced lactation became more explicable when she confided that her surgical wound from delivery (C-section) remained unhealed after 4 months.  Yet the baby's father, a man in his 60's, was resistant to the idea of family planning.  I tried to reason with him that having a child every year, and all of them dying, did not help him as much as a child every 3-4 years who lives . . . don't know if he bought my logic.  Decisions about sexuality and reproduction are rather personal, but the implications and effects ripple out, sometimes into a tsunami which engulfs innocent children and suffering women and desperate men.