Apiseta Lokeni, 

54, Nuu Fou

I don’t think it’s good to have many children; it’s good for those who have a lot of money and those who have good jobs. I think it depends on people if they want to make babies or not. It depends if they can afford them or not because we all know that life it really hard nowadays.

Leota mailei, 

55, Moamoa

I think it’s good to have more children; there is no bad thing about it. If you want to stop having children, that is up to you. I don’t agree with this thing called family planning as well. As you know, there are couples who are trying to have babies and want to have babies. So the good thing about having a lot of kids is that other couples who don’t have kids can adopt from you. That is why I don’t think we should have family planning. Back in the day, couples had heaps of children and it was easy for us to do things because the more the merrier. God should be the only one to stop you from having children if he thinks you have enough. But we should never do it on our own.

This is because children are gifts from God and every human born to this earth is useful to do God’s willing. Who knows maybe your son will grow up to be the next Prime Minister of Samoa? That’s why we should never use family planning. That’s God’s role. That is why I don’t support family planning. God said for us to multiply and have many children as many as the sand on the beach. So that’s what I think. 

Anthony Tofilau, 

22, Matautu

We all know that children are a gift from God. I don’t think having too many kids is a good idea, it’s good to increase our population but at the same time we also need to think about the future. Not only the future of our children but also the future of our country. And it depends on the family if they can afford. We should push through and increase the level of education. 

Sineva Alefosio, 

19, Vaitele

How can we say we need to increase the population when our economy cannot support the current population? I strongly disagree. The fact of the matter is that increasing the population will also increase the rate of unemployment. There will be too many people and yet there are not enough jobs for them. We’ve got a small country and it cannot support a large number of people; it will only make it overcrowded, which will result in the pollution of the air and also the environment. Hats off to family planning for playing an awesome role in developing the country because it helps control the amount of children a family can support. What we really need to increase is the level of education. 

Miracle Shalom Ioane, 

20, Lotopa.

Family planning is vital. For young couples, it is a way to control the number of children they can afford to have so that they don’t have to struggle in raising the children. However, if our government thinks that increasing the population is a positive thing for us, I would say that they should have benefits for the children. It’s true that there are benefits of having 10 children but that’s the problem, the benefits are  in the future! What about the struggles of today, tomorrow, and the next day? Some commit crimes like robbery just because they want to provide for their children. I’d say, we make our choice of when  to have kids because after all, the whole country is not going to help you raise your children. 99% of the struggle is on an individual or on the couple.