| Yawning
Bread. 24 August 2008
Babies wanted, but only in traditional families, the traditional way
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More financial help and an additional month of maternity leave have been announced. More pages -- an average of 3 per day in the press -- devoted to this subject. However, we shouldn't kid ourselves. All these measures represent the throwing of money at what is really a deep socio-psychological and socio-structural problem. The decline in fertility rate will only be seriously reversed when people want children. That won't happen because of economic incentives, though these may counter the social and economic disincentives of having children. It will only happen when it is seen as cool to have children in tow everywhere we go -– to house parties, to the supermarket, to work. A few months ago, I was at a friend's house for lunch. There were some 6 or 7 gay men. One of them said he was at a stage of life where he was feeling the paternal urge. From that remark, the conversation moved to whether fatherhood might ever become a norm for gay men. I remember I said it was totally imaginable. Norms change all the time. There might come a day when a gathering of 6 or 7 single gay men for lunch would seem strange. Instead, there might be 6 or 7 men chatting at the table, but with 6 or 7 kids romping about in the other room. Once it's seen as cool for gay men to raise children, the need to keep up with social expectations will see to the rest of it. And we'll have a scenario like this: The doorbell rings. Host: "Hey, hi, Luke. You're early." Luke: "Oh, sorry. Are we...?" Host: "No, not a problem. Zhiyong and Mark are already here. And hello Timmy..." Luke: "Say hello to uncle Huiding." Timmy: "Hello." Host: "Wow, you've grown." * * * * * Even worse would be to think that the levers that worked in the 1970s to get women to have fewer children, might work today to get them to have more. Some things are not symmetrical. Penalties can get people to stop doing something, but inducements do not work as well in getting people to do something for you. As the saying goes: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. While a true solution can only come from a change in social expectations, the TFR may still be nudged up by various practical inducements. Hence, I'm not about to say that the new measures won't work. I certainly hope they do, though it is unlikely our TFR will get more than halfway to 2.1. How to nudge it some more? This is where some features of the campaign strike me as unnecessarily rigid, suggesting a failure to think past habitual assumptions. I can see three:
In his National Day Rally speech, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong touched on gender roles. Men and women "have to share responsibilities for child-raising. Traditionally the husbands go to work, wear the pants, the wives stay at home, have the babies, take care of the babies," he said. However, as he pointed out, in an age where women too have career aspirations, such thinking stands in the way of having more children. The government must do something to encourage a change in mindset, he mused; perhaps schools should teach boys domestic science. One specific he did announce was for a new provision for one week of unpaid infant care leave per year for either parent, until the child is 2 years old. But when it came to an extra month of maternity leave, it's maternity leave, not paternity leave.
I have just two points to make: Firstly, even if it's 20 percent, it still makes a difference. You'd notice that the same logic does not apply to baby bonuses. No one expects all couples to produce the 4 or 5 kids that the bonuses provide for, yet that is not trotted out as a reason not to implement the scheme. Secondly, it is contradictory to exhort men to play a bigger role at home, but refuse to equalise the benefits. This kind of mixed signalling undercuts the message. It leaves one wondering whether the government has a patriarchal view of men as the more indispensable sex in the workplace, that it cannot persuade itself to legalise paternity leave across the board. As many may have noticed, running parallel with the birthrate campaign is a renewed focus on matchmaking. Changes are afoot with the government's "Ministry of Eugenics", also known as the Social Development Unit (SDU) and its stepsister, the Social Development Service (SDS), though exactly what difference they will make is subject to debate. Still, there is an attempt to make matchmaking more socially acceptable. In the Straits Times of 23 August for example, there was a full-page feature about parents getting involved in China, but what I thought was significant were these choice bits from the feature:
If even the Chinese, living in a country far less Westernised than Singapore, don't want busybodies involved, what more in the case of Singaporeans? In any event, all this is an unnecessary distraction. Linking marriage with procreation is to make things doubly hard for ourselves. Each is a high enough hurdle, what more of getting past both? For 30 years, the government has lamented the fact that a significant percentage of women never marry. In data from 2005, about 20% of women aged 35 and older are unmarried. For better-educated women, the percentage is even higher (about 30 percent, I recall from various news stories) and in a eugenics-driven state, this is an acute worry.
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Yet, procreation incentives are predicated on first getting
people married. For example, the much-heralded announcement in January
2007 that single mothers are now entitled to government-subsidised
maternity leave had one big caveat: The mother must be married to the
baby's father (and not any other man) within 3 months of the child's birth, to enjoy the benefit,
according to the International Herald Tribune
story, quoting from the
Straits Times.
I haven't yet analysed which of the newly announced maternity leave, tax exemptions and baby bonus incentives apply only to married couples, though just as likely, the marital conditions have not been publicised on the assumption that single parents are not worth our consideration. Perhaps because they are morally suspect? In a February 2007 letter (see box at right), the government affirmed that its policy is meant to "to reflect the prevailing societal view that parenthood should be within the context of marriage and that two-parent families provide the best environment for a child to grow up in and fulfil his or her potential." Frankly, I have never seen any survey that purports to show the prevalence of this view, or any proof that children must have 2 parents for their "best environment", other factors being equal, but I will leave these claims aside for now. We also seem keen to ignore the fact that marriage is hardly permanent. Our own Department of Statistics has data showing that there are one-third as many divorces as marriages, and it's an enduring pattern over the years.
Take note of metropolitan France, a country with a Total Fertility Rate of 1.95 [1], well above our 1.29, and pretty near the replacement rate of 2.1. Wouldn't we like to be in their shoes? Then read this news report:
No doubt letting singles have children and giving them equal access to state benefits is not by itself going to be a magic bullet that solves the birthrate problem, but it will probably add some percentage points. Despite the net gain we can obtain, we won't seize the possibility. We insist on making things doubly hard for ourselves because we cling to an archaic notion of family.
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Silence on alternative ways to beget children: adoption, surrogate pregnancy, etc Related, but not exclusively linked to encouraging singles to raise children, are a host of other issues which our government would rather not touch: easing up on adoption, especially from foreign countries (wouldn't that break down our neat racial pigeon holes?), surrogate pregnancy (wouldn't the religious rightwing yell at us?) and in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). To be fair, the Prime Minister did announce at the National Day Rally speech new subsidies for in-vitro fertilisation. Needless to say, only heterosexually-married women qualify. And beneath all of these questions, no doubt there will be the fear that (gasp!) "homosexuals" will be rushing to raise children. In every one of these issues, the stumbling block is not concern for the wellbeing of the child, but luddite moralism, plain and simple. None of these issues prejudice the potential of the child. Under liberal but reasonably regulated conditions, adoption, IVF and surrogate pregnancy, will see more people, married or unmarried, straight or gay, choosing to have children, and adding worthy new citizens to the population. Once again, these steps don't make a magic bullet, but they will add some desperately needed percentage points to the birthrate. I see Andy Ho of the Straits Times has written an article on surrogate pregnancy [2]. It's a good start to a national debate we must have. * * * * * How about thinking beyond the paradigm? © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes
Addenda None
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Sick yet of the campaign? For the last month or so, our mainstream media
have been nagging us about our low birthrate and loud-hailing the various
government schemes attending to that. At 1.29 children per woman, our
Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is indeed well below the replacement level of
2.1, so yes, there is a problem.
