Tough Fight For Fujimori Peru President Confronts Church Over Birth Control

After defeating leftist guerrillas and taming astronomical inflation in his first term, President Alberto Fujimori is confronting the Roman Catholic Church as he begins his second.

The issue is birth control.

Fujimori threw down the gauntlet in his July 28 inauguration speech, announcing the government would make family planning services available to low-income Peruvians. The campaign is part of his overall goal of fighting poverty.

“If we speak of the future we have to talk about planning or birth control,” Fujimori said, adding that there was no room for “sacred cows” in his government.

He said state involvement would ensure that families with low income and low education would have the same access to artificial birth control as the upper classes. But he denied that abortion, which is illegal but available at a price, would be part of the “aggressive” campaign.

Nevertheless, the speech set off alarms within the church hierarchy, which supports only natural birth control methods.

“To push in a massive and aggressive way artificial methods of birth control runs the risk of not solving the root problems that have to do with education and culture,” said Bishop Fernando Vargas Ruis of Arequipa, Peru’s second largest city. “It encourages a sexuality that is not based on the family.”

The Peruvian Bishops Conference issued a letter saying artificial contraception was “morally unacceptable.”

The controversy has also dismayed some in Fujimori’s ruling coalition, which usually provides him with unwavering support.

“As a Catholic, obviously I object to artificial methods that are against Christian morality,” said Congress president Martha Chavez, a strong Fujimori backer who has links to the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei.

This is not the first time Fujimori has raised the issue of family planning. A similar effort nearly two years ago ran into a wall of opposition from the bishops.

Since then, however, Fujimori’s standing has improved markedly. He was reelected by an overwhelming margin this year to another five-year term and maintains an approval rating of around 65 percent.

And although Peru is 90 percent Roman Catholic, a poll last year showed that many Peruvians supported Fujimori’s position on birth control the first time he raised the issue.

Fujimori, the son of Japanese Buddhist immigrants, says he is a Catholic.

Fujimori has emphasized that controlling the country’s birth rate is key to improving the country’s standard of living. With Shining Path guerrillas virtually eliminated and inflation now under 15 percent a year, he is focusing on economic growth and fighting poverty.

More than half the country lives in poverty. The government says that Peru has one of the highest fertility rates in Latin America: 3.4 children per woman, compared with 3.1 for other countries in the region. Among poor Peruvian women, the figure jumps to an average of 5.5 children.