The story was about Janice Lee and Jessica Toh (not their real names) who spoke of the lack of tax breaks and financial incentives (Baby Bonus), and ineligibility for government-built flats.

Then the newspaper approached a PAP Member of Parliament, Sin Boon Ann, for his response. He said,

'The family unit with a father, mother and child is the fabric with which we weave our community,' said the chairman of the Government Parliamentary Committee for Community Development, Youth and Sports, MP Sin Boon Ann. 'That should not be compromised.'

Not surprised that there are more unwed mums, he said 'Being better educated and financially independent gives them the choice to raise babies single-handedly.'

But he felt that having made alternative lifestyle choices, they should not then ask the Government to bend rules to accommodate them.

Essentially, he's saying that our State doctrine calls for a certain kind of family, and if you have chosen to flout it, then don't complain if you're left out in the cold.

In the week after, 4 letters were published by the newspaper. You can read them here.

Let me digress a little and explain something about the Baby Bonus scheme, an incentive aimed at reversing Singapore’s declining birth rate, which is currently well below replacement rate.

The incentive is applicable to the first 4 children born to a woman. There are a number of conditions, notable among which are

• The children must be Singapore citizens
• The mother must be legally married at the time of conception or birth 
• Legally adopted children to married couples are also applicable.

Step children and children who are not Singapore citizens are not eligible and not considered in the counting of the birth order.

The first child gets a cash gift of $3,000, credited to the mother in installments over the first 18 months of the baby’s life.

The second child gets a cash gift of $3,000 (spread over 18 months), and the government contributes up to $6,000 as co-savings over the first 6 years of the child’s life. The mechanism is like this: the parents must open a special account with POSBank for the child, and for every dollar they save in this account, the government will add another dollar (up to a maximum of $6,000). The money in this account can be used for childcare and kindergarten charges, and from Dec 2005, for Medishield and equivalent health insurance.

The third and fourth child each gets a cash gift of $6,000 (over 18 months) and a dollar for dollar co-savings incentive of up to $12,000.

The scheme is still very new, having been announced only last year, so it’s too early to say what effect it has had.

The issue raised by the news story about Janice Lee and Jessica Toh is why benefits such as the Baby Bonus aren’t available to mothers who aren’t married.

The position taken by those defend this inequity will sound very familiar to sexual minorities:  To do so would encourage alternative lifestyles (which are considered bad without need for further elaboration), and erode family values (which are narrowly defined) based on the traditional family (which is automatically assumed to be good, or at least incomparably better than other family structures).

To be honest, though very few would admit it, there are also unstated motives. There is a general perception that racial minorities or the underclass of the racial majority (Chinese in Singapore's case) are morally inferior. This is in fact a very common prejudice held by dominant classes in any country. Among the attributes of moral inferiority is the tendency to be sexually wanton. So, in a very vague, never-articulated way, there is a fear that the racial minorities and the unwashed will breed like rabbits, eventually swamping the civilized section of society, or at least, turning the table of political dominance against them.

(This fear of the underclass breeding like rabbits is an irrational one, hence even in a shortage-of-babies situation, as opposed to the prospect of overpopulation, the fear persists.)

The desire thus to hold back the tide of the dark-skinned and the unwashed is expressed through restricting breeding incentives to the morally-superior own kind. Moral superiority here is equated with legal marriage between a male and a female. Furthermore, incentives are skewed (through the co-savings plan) to benefit the richer couples more than the poorer ones, once more favouring the dominant class.

And this is where the Straits Times' story becomes discomfiting. Janice Lee was described as a 31-year-old PhD candidate who had been working as a human resource specialist at a multinational company. Jessica Toh was described as a 31-year-old financial planner.

They don't sound like folks from the racial or economic underclass. They therefore challenge the assumption that the dominant class are morally superior, where they all get married (heterosexually, of course), and virtuously hold off sex and pregnancy until they're wedded..

MP Sin Boon Ann was quick to ride on this unexpected demographic profile when he said, "'Being better educated and financially independent gives them the choice to raise babies single-handedly." In other words, they are educated enough and rich enough to pay the price of their own immorality.

But he was too quick on the draw, for when he did that, he unwittingly opened the question of what then should happen if the woman is not a well-educated one, and financially strained. The obvious corollary to his statement should be that since they are not "better educated and financially independent", the State shouldn't deny them assistance.

We know of course, that Sin didn't intend to mean this, but clearly, in his haste to defend State doctrine, he unthinkingly undermined it.

The other issue raised by the Straits Times' story is the thoughtless idea that the women freely chose to be single-mothers. It is evident in the term "alternative lifestyle" which connotes choice, and a hedonistic one at that. And Sin was reported to have actually used the word "choice".

Well, strictly speaking, you could say that at critical points the women could have chosen differently. They could have ensured they were on contraceptives before having sex. They could have chosen to abort the baby. But I think we need to be realistic. Very few decide to be a single mother from scratch. The complications to one's life are so huge that few would make this kind of choice from a standing start. More typically, it's an accretion of choices in the form of "the lesser of two evils", in a series of dilemmas.

As Janice Lee's story pointed out, her boyfriend had proposed to her, but when she got pregnant he wanted her to have an abortion. Put yourself in her position. Would you still want to be married to such a man, who for whatever reason, doesn't seem to want the commitment to children and family? Is the prospect of marriage still viable? If that's ruled out, then what about the human life already inside you?

It's a very tough decision, and it is difficult to fault her for respecting the sanctity of life.

As Michael Loh said in his letter to the Straits Times (22 April 2005), "It seems that being responsible is worse off than being irresponsible one more time!"

In fact this should remind us that we ought to be very uncomfortable about State policies that tilt decisions in favour of abortion - a very serious moral trap.

One of the letters published by the Straits Times was by a certain Daryl Lim. He said,

The answer to the problems single mothers face lies not in quick policy fixes by doling out privileges equally, but rather in reforming lax public attitudes towards sex and marriage, and having harsh deterrents.

Morality at all costs! His definition of it, needless to say. Perhaps among the "harsh deterrents", he'd like to institute caning for pre-marital affairs.

At a macro level, the single-mom issue is yet another example of the perennial Singapore problem – the way State doctrine stands opposed to equity.

Other examples include: Unequal medical benefits between male and female civil servants; the fact that in divorces, husbands cannot claim alimony from higher-income wives; and divorced fathers with custody of children do not get the same childcare benefits (e.g. maid permits) as divorced mothers. And of course there are a host of inequities suffered by gay people.

Even as justice is considered a pillar of Singapore's founding contract, at every turn, this ideal is trumped by an outmoded, patriarchal conception of family and social structure. Every time an issue is raised, instead of hearing policymakers acknowledge, "yes, this sounds like an injustice, let's see what can be done...", we hear, "this is our doctrine, too bad."

At every plane where doctrine and equity conflict, a section of Singapore society is frozen out. Add all the planes together, and lots of people feel hard done by in some way. Justice and equality for all is an uplifting, inclusive idea. Doctrine over everything is a discouraging, marginalising habit. It should surprise no one that so many people feel disaffected by the "system" in Singapore.

© Yawning Bread