Abortion destroys families and the nation

Posted on April 3, 2013 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Abortion destroys nation building’, 2 April 2013, Voices, Today

(Edmund Leong Meng Tsi): It is indeed “Time again to review abortion laws” (April 1), considering the long-term emotional harm on post-abortive women. Some of them are adversely affected and are easier to identify, as they suffer visibly. Much is known about the treatments for them.

Literature on abortion suggests that “unaffected” women harden their hearts instead. Cognitive dissonance hinders their ability to love properly because they had denied love to their closest kin through abortion, and yet must continue to extend love and show compassion to others throughout their lives.

They feared a tiny human so much as to eliminate it, and will subconsciously guard against bigger humans by building walls around their hearts. I believe that when the heart of the family is compromised, the entire family is affected. Emotional strains can tear families apart, and the effects can be passed to future generations.

Singapore’s nation-building efforts are inadvertently being foiled not only because 12,000 babies are aborted annually, but because women are offered an easy way out of adversity.

Abortion is biased towards self-interest by eliminating another’s interest, thereby destroying families and the nation. We must instead utilise all means to keep babies and their mothers alive, physically and emotionally. Adoption is the better choice.

The issue of legalised abortion has been fought over by pro-lifers, pro-choicers, feminists, religious folks, moral philosophers, doctors and politicians for ages, and we will probably never understand enough about the human consciousness or even what ‘life’ means to come to a consensus on the ‘rights and wrongs’ of terminating a ‘potential’ human being. So instead people focus on abortion as a matter of disrupting the natural order of how society traditionally grows. Even more so now that we’re facing a dearth of babies and on surface it would seem logical to assume that one unaborted baby equals to +1 population. If only it were that simple.

In the eighties, loss of babies who could be borne of educated couples was deemed a shame and a loss of productive citizenry. A writer known only as PGT lamented the loss of ‘educated genes’ which would have given rise to ‘smarter babies’. Husbands whose wives went for revenge abortions decried them for ‘the break up of an otherwise happy marriage and family relationship’. Our ‘over-liberal’ abortion laws would also supposedly encourage more people to ‘change bed-partners without any sense of responsibility’. The fact is we have been promiscuous and having unwanted babies way before surgical abortion even existed. The difference is being skewered with a blade on an operating theatre vs drinking some awful tasting folk remedy concocted by your witch-doctor that would scramble your foetus into a bloody pulp before you shed its mushy corpse out through your genitalia. Even today, you’d find dead or barely alive infants in toilets, rubbish chutes or buried in the ground. We always had a means of killing the unborn if we wanted to, with varying success, but nations didn’t get ‘destroyed’ and families still thrived.

If one could ‘destroy’ a nation by depriving it of babies and have abortion turning us all into promiscuous devil-may-care lunatics who scrimp on condoms, neither is it a good idea to have children borne out of mothers who wanted them eliminated out of their uteri in the first place. The simplistic answer to unloved babies would be adoption, but that’s assuming every rejected baby will automatically be shuffled away from a ‘hardened’, emotionless mother and nurtured in a warm, loving home where stepparents make them Eggs Benedict for breakfast everyday.

There are as many complications of reluctant birth as there are to terminating pregnancies. What if no one wants your baby? If your chronically depressed mother told you she had wanted to abort you but was forced to relent at the last minute, and she couldn’t find anyone to take over maternal duties because you were such an ugly infant with all sorts of respiratory problems, how would that make you feel? Even if you found yourself a home, what if your foster parents, though initially enthusiastic about the whole adoption thing, turn out to be really terrible people who wish they had picked someone else from the orphanage? What if you found out that you were conceived after your mother was gang-raped and she couldn’t bear to put you down? Neither choice is, as the writer proclaimed, an ‘easy way out of adversity’, nor do women who face the abortion dilemma necessarily FEAR that tiny human like it was the devil’s spawn. Tell that to the rape victim, the single unemployed mom with quintuplet foetuses, or the mother who realises her baby’s got a monstrous physical defect or severe Down’s syndrome.

We can do little about sex-starved teenagers and religious attitudes towards contraception, but it’ll take more than a nasty pre-abortion video, or haranguing anti-abortionist men who speak about post-abortion psyche as if they’ve been through it themselves, to keep the deaths of the unborn in check.

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Filed under: 1980s, 2013, Babies, Funerals/Death, Parenting, Sex | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Work-life balance a slogan with little reality

Posted on September 13, 2012 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Work-life balance: A reality check’, 13 Sept 2012, Voices, Today

(Shafie Halim): We need to turn over every stone to create a conducive environment for procreation. In our fast-paced society, it takes more than dangling baby bonuses, housing carrots, maternity and paternity leave for couples to start a family.

Typically, Singaporeans work more than 44 hours a week, a benchmark set during Singapore’s industrialisation, when factory production lines were emerging and much of the workflow was manual. This has not been reviewed for almost 30 years. Today, many work processes are no longer tied to the number of hours spent at the desk.

Yet, many companies still have a 5.5-day work week. In some developed countries, it is 40 working hours or fewer a week, which makes us appear like an ancient civilisation. At present, work-life balance is a slogan with little reality. Flexible working hours should not be misconstrued as a contribution to work-life balance, as the hours clocked remain status quo.

While ‘ancient civilisations’ did spend more time physically toiling in a day than what we do in the office for an entire WEEK, most of their activities that we no longer define as ‘work’ revolved around finding food, shelter, or harvesting stuff. The rest of it is waiting, sleeping, singing, dancing, killing or having sex with each other. Our ancestors could afford to be poets, bards, monks, barbarians, nomads or the guy who goes around town shouting the latest gossip or putting out the street lamps. Before the invention of the light bulb, they could do nothing at night other than huddling around the fire, creating their own god-stories, mending loincloths, swatting flies, making babies, or training their children to become savage warlords. Some of us aren’t ashamed to ‘work around the clock’, our phones on 24 hours waiting for business or for the boss to text at 3 am in the morning. In a way, with their nasty, brutish, short lives, they achieved more ‘work-life balance’ than any of us will ever have, if you define ‘life’ in Old World terms, which is mostly staying alive and breeding. With all our technology, relative free time and longevity, we’re still having trouble with the latter.

No developed nation is willing to forsake that insatiable drive, that contagious work ethic that has become a First World addiction, for some touchy-feely concept like ‘work-life balance’, which takes the fire out of the ‘striving’ to get where we are today. It’s as distant from reality as a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, the happy ending of a cannibalistic Grimm fairy tale, there only to give the warm and cuddly illusion that organisations actually treat their workers as human beings rather than cogs in a machine, like wardens giving prisoners a whiff of freshly brewed coffee in the morning, while they line up waiting to be dispensed a glob of liquid tar in their mugs instead.

‘Busyness’ is a badge of honour. To appear hurried and drained is a peacock’s display of passion and enthusiasm. People stack their files like gladiators showing off battle scars. We vie to be the office ‘workhorse’ and organisations can’t help but reward ‘workaholic’ attitudes. No testimonial of an ‘employee of the month’ is complete without the recipient ‘going beyond’ his scope of work, ‘going the extra mile’,  or ‘working even when he had SARS’. We fight tooth and nail for such awards so that we can use these to move on up to the next better job, where we’ll subject ourselves to the same, unyielding, masochistic pleasure of HARD work again. In our job interviews everyone has an anecdote about how they put in long, severe hours to get a project done. You’re not likely to beat the workaholic to the job if you rave about your appreciation of  ‘work-life balance’ to your future employer. Most employers only ask about your family out of courtesy, or slyly assess the likelihood of you going on maternity/paternity leave, not to sit entranced by how fulfilling and invigorating your Sunday family picnics are.

We’ve been slogging so long and hard that taking a day off just to ‘do nothing’ elicits yelps of fake envy from your colleagues, when deep down inside they console themselves knowing that they’ve done more in one day than you. But it seems that we have been grumbling about the 44-hour work week for decades. In the eighties, you already hardly had time for the ‘finer things in life’, like music, painting, or even PRAYING. We realised that we’re all working ourselves to death but calming this fever didn’t mean taking LESS hours of work, but rather people telling us HOW to do it better without sacrificing the 44 hour metronome. S Dhanablan told us how to work ‘smarter’, and  5 day work weeks were the stuff of office-drone wet dreams. In the nineties, ‘flexible’ working hours was all the rage, and we started to recognise the importance of a ‘parent-friendly’ workplace. In 2002 came scintillating buzzwords like ‘flexi-hours’, ‘flexi-place’, ‘family friendly’ and the Gaia-like ‘work-life HARMONY’. It’s also sadly ironic that to in order to achieve that ‘harmony’, the MCDS had to create ‘WORK’ groups to look into it, calling its main arm the ‘Work Life Unit’. I’d imagine these people as cherubs who play harps all day long.

To sugarcoat a ’24 hour economy’ with bits and pieces of soothing catchphrases is like sticking smiley faces on a charging bull. We can’t change our attitudes overnight, when working the late shift, burning midnight oil, being ‘too busy to eat’ are among other neurotic habits that our workers are compelled to engage in to feel relevant and on par with their peers. Where management sees effort as a compensating factor for innovation, skill, expertise or even intelligence. Where ‘giving it your all’ feeds that gaping chasm in your soul with the nourishing milk of temporary achievement. You might say you can ‘do no wrong’ working yourself to death. The least you could be is a ‘solid worker’. And for some, that says a lot. Work is a 4 letter word, but like the OTHER 4 letter word, we can’t get enough of it. So it’s not so much unturning stones anymore, as it is pushing a boulder up a hill like Sisyphus, only for it to roll back down to square one again.

Filed under: 1980s, 2000s, 2012, Babies, Money | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Malay men more romantic than Chinese men

Posted on August 16, 2012 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Do Malay husbands know something that Chinese husbands don’t?’, 15 Aug 2012, ST Forum

(Ivan Goh): THE total fertility rate of Malay Singaporeans last year was 1.64, followed by Indian Singaporeans at 1.09 and Chinese Singaporeans at 1.08 (“Get married, have babies”; Sunday).

Most incentives – maternity leave, maid levies and discounted taxes – are aimed at women, and may be working better for the Malays than for the Chinese. Perhaps the Government should find out why Malay women are more willing to have babies.

Are Malay men more romantic, persuasive and less stressed out by life’s perceived demands than Chinese men? Do Malay couples have a more viable network of caregivers?

I would like to believe that a man with confidence is attractive to women. He can better influence his wife to have more babies, especially if he believes he can adequately provide for the family. How can Chinese Singaporean men attain more confidence? In this modern age, the ability to provide translates into how much a man earns and his job security.

Greater confidence may well encourage Singaporean men to take the plunge earlier, and increase the potential for having babies sooner.

The statistics speak for itself and few have dared to ask why the Chinese are lagging behind our Muslim community, until the writer decided to broach a sensitive topic that has always been muddied by almost-taboo factors such as educational level, genes, status, religion, culture, diet and libido. There are exceptions in both races of course, with Chinese families who produce up to quadruple the national fertility average, and Malay families who stick to one child or none at all, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why Malay families are, on average, bigger than Chinese ones without stumbling into some form of stereotyping and risk accusations of racism. By saying that Malay couples have ‘more free time and are less stressed’ is insinuating that they don’t ‘work as hard’. By saying that they’re ‘persuasive’ is suggesting that Malay men are born sex machines. Such arguments are loaded with negative, unhelpful connotations and without a thorough, nationwide sex survey on the habits and appetites of the typical Chinese or Malay spouse, it’s all guesswork for now. I’m pretty doubtful, though, whether the writer’s claim of the Chinese man being less adept in the skills of seduction has anything to do with our miserable TFR. In this age of reproductive technology, you can father a child as long as you can afford it, even without bothering to pleasure your wife at all. There’s also an inherent contradiction in correlating confidence with earning power and hence more babies. Surely if a man spends most of his time making money, he’d have less for the Mrs, or children.  Or he would apply his gleaming confidence and hence sex appeal anywhere else other than at home and put their entire family unit at risk.

It’s also reasonable to ask if Chinese women place more emphasis on their careers hence put off childbearing compared to Malay women, rather than whether Malay men are Lotharios and Casanovas compared to the Pee Wee Herman Chinese. A husband can sweet serenade his wife all night long but will still fail if she’s not in the mood. Maybe it’s not Chinese men who are not ‘confident’ enough, but their women who are too ‘gung-ho’ when it comes to chasing their careers, to the point that sex becomes a 2 minute formality or non-existent and babies are pushed to the bottom of the ‘to-do’ list. Maybe it’s nothing at all to do with how career-minded Chinese couples are, but a case of poor time management. Maybe being a housewife and marrying early is more socially acceptable to a Muslim family than a Chinese one. Maybe people bring more babies into the world because they were born into big fertile families themselves, with the ‘extended family network’ being an incentive for raising a child, along with the passing down of ‘baby-making’ genes, which pretty much condemns the fate of traditionally small Chinese families to a self-limiting vicious cycle.

No one would profess to have the answer and maybe no one wants to know what it is because anything that you hypothesise is bound to be discriminatory in some way or other, but picking on the Chinese male’s personality flaw is probing the bark of a tree without seeing the forest.

Filed under: 2012, Babies, Racism, Religion, Sex, Singaporean men, Singaporean women | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

LKY and the ‘folding up’ of Singapore

Posted on August 12, 2012 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Get married, have babies’, 12 Aug 2012, article by Leonard Lim, Sunday Times

…In his annual National Day dinner speech to residents of Tanjong Pagar GRC and Tiong Bahru, Mr Lee kept his message on population simple: The country’s citizens are not reproducing enough, and migrants are needed as a temporary solution. But in the long run, mindsets must change, and the trend of declining birth rates needs to be reversed.

“If we go on like that, this place will fold up because there will be no original citizens left to form the majority,” he said. And we cannot have new citizens, new PRs settle our social ethos, our social spirit, our social norms.

“So, my message is a simple one. The answer is very difficult, but the problems, if we don’t find the answers, are enormous.”

Oh boy are we in trouble. According to the CIA Factbook, we are down in the doldrums in terms of total fertility rate at a miserable 0.78, which is way below the minimum number to replace ourselves. But what’s interesting about LKY’s exhortations to procreate is not what’s being said, but what’s NOT. For example, he did not say that educated women with pHDs should get boyfriends and settle down. He also did not specifically urge the Chinese to pick up the slack. What can only be inferred, from how he social-engineered the Singapore population experiment over the years and from the number of PRCs working here, is that it’s the faltering Chinese Singaporeans that he’s really concerned about.

Racial composition is rarely mentioned these days, but it seems that the old man built this nation using his own golden ratio of how each ethnicity should make up the population, even if it meant staunching its growth at certain critical periods in Singapore’s history, and to see his formula for success fail in the face of ‘personal choice’ is like God stomping his feet because his creatures are not sucking on the sweet nectar of the fruits that he created for them. I would feel the same way if I’m playing Simcity and my little people refuse to reproduce themselves. Anyone would be tempted to push the reset button rather than see your piece of work destroy itself. You get the feeling that LKY’s lament is more an emotional one than one that involves deep, probing reflection or acceptance of the fact that where we are now is the result of an abject failure of balancing First World ambitions with First World problems. We are having it faster, stronger, better but weaning ourselves off the face of this earth while at it, like tireless, naive male spiders trying to get it on with the Black Widow of progress.

The last time LKY mentioned ‘racial balance’ was in relation to the SAF and the tenuousness of our position in the region in terms of defence.

‘If we continue this way without the new immigrants and PRs and their children doing national service, the composition of our SAF will change. So please remember that…..It is in Singapore’s interest to have immigrants who can be integrated without upsetting the racial balance.‘

In response to the influx of Hongkongers in the eighties, he expressed a resolute fondness for the ‘status quo’:

Let us just maintain the status quo. And we have to maintain it or there will be a shift in the economy, both the economic performance and the political backdrop which makes that economic performance possible…..You look at the educational levels of the performers. It has got to do with culture, nature and so many other factors. But year after year this is the end result. Let’s leave well alone. The formula has worked. Keep it.

‘Nature’, of course, is a euphemism for RACE. A UMNO MP did not mince his words when taking the cue from LKY regarding the fate of the Malay majority in Malaysia, saying that LKY’s coercions were to ‘strengthen the dominance of the Chinese on the island’. When you mention ‘racial mix’ and optimal ‘performance’ in the same breath, it becomes quite obvious that you’re hinting that a certain group is driving the success of the country, though that looks set to change at the rate we’re welcoming Caucasian billionaires with open arms, not to mention plying foreign income off our two casinos. LKY wouldn’t want to mess up the HDB ethnic quota too. The Ethnic Integration Policy, by capping the proportion of races in housing estates, was intended to ‘maintain a healthy racial mix’, without specifying what an ‘unhealthy’ composition is. In 20 years when our homegrown population will presumably halve in size, the EIP and its secret ratios will need some revisions as well. I mean, you don’t want your neighbours rioting and burning the flat to the ground over curry smells would you.

We have no data on the proportion of races among Singaporeans renouncing their citizenship, erstwhile pretending that emigration doesn’t exist. If making couples have sex more often is an insurmountable hurdle, how about trying to figure out what’s making Singaporeans want to LEAVE? It’s likely that the answer would partially explain our reluctance to have children. Chan Chun Sing and the MSF have their work cut out for them, and if he’s serious about pushing our TFR up, perhaps he should come clean with the numbers, examine the reasons why people abandon their Home, and let us all know of the gravity of the situation, instead of hiding painful facts from Singaporeans like sweeping broken glass under the carpet. If all else fails, be wary when our NEWwater starts tasting funny and you feel tingly sensations in all the wrong places after drinking it.

But it’s not just a freak census that LKY’s terrified of. It’s the PM’s position and PAP leadership itself. In 1988, LKY remarked that Singapore ‘was not ready’ for an Indian Prime Minister, that he would have considered S Dhanabalan if not for his ‘Indian ethnicity’. Our cabinet still holds a majority of Chinese ministers, and remains a reflection of the ground demographics. So when it looks like that precious ‘formula’ is on the brink of shattering and LKY’s worst nightmares are on the verge of coming true (though he probably wouldn’t live long enough to witness it), we have an ENORMOUS problem on our hands, and it’s not just a matter of the EXTINCTION of the Singaporean, but the fall of a NATION, when the house that is our little red dot is no longer a home. In the spirit of the business parlance used by LKY, Singapore Inc may have to ‘close shop’ if nothing is done. And it takes more than a cheeky Mentos ad  (National night, hip hop or hip flop?) and a Ministry playing the role of Love Guru to do it.

Filed under: 1980s, 2010, 2012, Army, Babies, Foreign workers, Politicians, Racism, Singaporean men, Singaporean women | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Toddlers in ‘preparatory’ classes

Posted on April 29, 2012 by gdy2shoez

From ‘First to prep classes, then to Pri 1′, 29 April 2012, article by Jane Ng, Sunday Times

For some parents, kindergarten is not enough to get their children ready for primary school. They are enrolling their six-year-olds in special ‘preparatory classes’ that claim to give children a head start for going to Primary 1.

So on top of attending kindergarten classes five days a week, the six-year-olds attend English, mathematics and mother tongue classes once or twice a week. Parents are forking out $100 to $275 a month for these so-called enrichment classes provided by private centres.

Popular centres like Berries, Learning Lab and Learning Point have waiting lists of up to a year for these weekend classes. Given the growing demand, other schools, like Young Champs Eduland, have jumped on the bandwagon. Another, Enfant Educare, has nine of these programmes for everything from phonics to abacus and hanyu pinyin.

‘Enfants’, not infants

Prep class is basically TUITION for toddlers, and ‘giving a head start’ is being KIASU. It’s OK, we’re Singaporeans, no need to pussyfoot around terms like ‘enrichment’, when all this is really an arms race among parents pitting their kids against each other to the death, sometimes literally.  Tuition for pre-schoolers is almost a half-century old practice, or rather RITUAL. In other societies kids have to endure genital mutilation without anaesthetic or engage in bloody combat with the neighbours to earn their place. Here, parents chuck them into pre-school and pre-pre schools, supplementing with weekend/holiday tuition or cram school under the benevolent guise of ‘enrichment’. It also helps if you have a French name (Petite Papillon), sound like a fashion brand (Julia Gabriel) an Italian restaurant (Montesorri), or a haunted house (House on a Hill).    These are no longer ‘nurseries’; one centre even calls itself ‘Little Uni’ , making no pretense at all that they’re really gearing up children for the long and winding educational superhighway. The greatest trick these businesses have pulled  is convincing parents that children actually enjoy attending these things, rather than, you know, SLEEPING or playing with/eating sand at the beach.

Some centres, like Del Care Edu Centre, even provide lessons for 2 to 18 MONTH old BABIES. Which means we have children among us who recognise flashcards before their own uncles’ faces. Did I say ‘children’? I meant zombies brain-harvested to battle it out in primary school who can speak Japanese and French before crafting a proper Knock-Knock joke, or even walk. Before you know it, our kids would have evolved with brains bigger than their gastrointestinal systems and instead of ‘playing’ with them you are compelled to engage in a lively dialogue about phonics. No more trading goos and ga’s, funny faces or catching ball anymore. ‘Play’ has to be ‘purposeful’, ‘sensorial’ and ‘exploratory’ and they have to ‘self-discover’ or ‘self-actualise’ while at it. They no longer just read or write or doodle, but must nurture ‘creative thinking’. Nothing so useless as a tickle should deter a child from ‘achieving their fullest potential’. It’s politically incorrect to call your boy a ‘little monster’, he’s just ‘over-expressing his self-worth’. What these centres have successfully done is turn the wild manic beast that is childhood into a lab rat with electrodes and meters strapped to its brain. Which explains The Learning ‘Lab’, though another has the audacity to call itself the ‘Playground Preschool’, both an insult  to actual playgrounds and an oxymoron too. You probably have to do mental sums while going down the slide, or discuss Newton’s Law of Motion on the see-saws. In the Little Gym, parent-bonding physical activities are outsourced to the professionals, where you have pay a fee just to let your baby ‘tumble’.

Thank god we still have pets for what’s left of the fun things in life. With all the spatial skills and street smarts sapped in exchange for preparatory ‘knowledge’ and ‘grooming’, I’ll be amazed if our kids today can even pass a marble through a hoop, or even tell their parents apart from PRC kidnappers for that matter. I wonder just how ‘prepared’ these kids are for the REAL world, where you have this thing called PEOPLE to deal with; bullies, bosses, customers, friends, family, strangers etc, not just caged up kids grilled in the latest scientific educational methods. Just browsing through the various ‘philosophies’ of these centres reveals an unsettling trend, the premature quest to turn our kids into tiny, confident adults, all this in the constraints of a controlled facility which purveyors of patented techniques and ‘programs’ like to call a ‘creative environment’. Mandarin educators Berries refer to kids as ‘the most important people in the world’. Young Champs Eduland submits their clients to ‘leadership training, complete with character building skills to create individuals with a difference’. You see the same objectives for adult business courses. Why are these parents in such a hurry to see their babies turn into typical rat-racers, and why are these tuition centres inflating the child’s ego to the moon, fostering a sense of bloated entitlement that they are natural born champions, leaders or abacus wizards? Our kids want to be astronauts, pilots and ninjas, not business negotiators or politicians. Let them live already, just for once.

Filed under: 1960s, 2012, Babies, Kids, Money, Parenting, Teachers | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

PM Lee wants more Dragon babies

Posted on January 22, 2012 by gdy2shoez

From PM Lee: Singapore’s fertility rate up last year, 22 Jan 2012, article by Judith Tan/Lydia Lim, Sunday Times

Singapore’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) picked up slightly last year to 1.20, up from a historic low of 1.15 in 2010. The Prime Minister announced the figure on Saturday in his Chinese New Year message, which focused on the central role of families as anchors for identity and sense of belonging, and sources of support in good times and bad.

Mr Lee Hsien Loong also said: ‘I fervently hope that this year will be a big Dragon year for babies.‘ Historically, Singapore enjoys a baby boom every Dragon year, which comes round every 12 years.

…Singapore’s TFR has been on a downward trend and is way below the replacement level of 2.1. It fell from 1.60 in 2000 to 1.20 last year, despite government measures to encourage couples to have more children. The TFR for Chinese Singaporeans is lower, falling from 1.43 to 1.08 over the same period.

Whether there’s a spike in Dragon babies born or not, the general trend is a fertility decline. 1988, two Dragon Years ago, saw a  high of 1.98, a figure that seems unattainable now unless someone flushes our reservoirs with  fertility drugs. Baby booms alone, of course, will not guarantee population growth over time, no matter how many baby-friendly packages are promised by the PM every CNY. It was recently revealed that an average 1000 Singaporeans pack their bags for greener pastures EVERY YEAR. Making Singapore family-friendly isn’t enough, you need to make baby-boomers happy enough to want to stay, or at least not kill themselves. Which means a total revamp of the educational, labour, political and leisure scene to keep citizens stimulated and proud to be Singaporean, not just expanding maternity wards or building more kindergartens.

Lee Kuan Yew kickstarted the CNY baby wish-list in the 80′s after the Dragon boom in 1988.  While encouraging couples to ignore the Zodiac, he also refuted the long-held belief that the Dragon year was auspicious for China’s Chinese at all, citing the great Tangshan earthquake in the last dragon year in 1976.

We should not decide the birth of our children by animal years. Have your babies in any year, including the Snake Year.

And if that year has less babies than Dragon Year, there will be the advantage of more places in good schools and at universities.

The latter statement was a catch that his son refused to elaborate on 24 years later, just as I suspected. But that was 1988, and even though we were just below the 2.1 replacement mark then, we could afford to temper the Dragon craze with a healthy  dose of reality.

Here’s a sample of PM’s baby urgings during CNY speeches over the years, and whether what he wished for actually came true.

2011 (Rabbit), Lee Hsien Loong, TFR increased by 0.05 to 1.20 :

I hope more couples will start or add to their families in the Year of the Rabbit. Chinese New Year is the time for families to come together in celebration, and more babies can mean only more joy in the years to come.

2010 (Tiger), Lee Hsien Loong, TFR dropped from 1.23 to 1.15:

It is one thing to encourage ourselves with the traditional attributes of the zodiac animals…But it is another to cling on to superstitions against children born in the Year of the Tiger, who are really no different from children born under other animal signs.

2009 (Ox), Lee Hsien Loong, TFR dropped from 1.28 to 1.23 (Official stats cite the latter TFR as 1.22)

Even in hard times, we should not neglect the need to bring up a new generation. If you remember, every time there was a recession, birth rates went down. But I hope this time we can buck the trend and keep the birth rate steady. We have implemented many measures to encourage marriage and help you in supporting and bringing up your children. There is also a lag time in procreation, so with luck your babies will arrive in time to enjoy the upswing.

2008(Rat), Lee Hsien Loong, TFR dropped from 1.29 to 1.28.

The government is studying the practical arrangements carefully, to see how we can create an even friendlier environment for having and raising children. We want Singapore to be a great place to bring up families and children.

Looking at his track record since 2008, it’s either PM Lee’s mild exhortations are falling on deaf ears, or the family initiatives are simply not working. To sum up, here’s the TFR trend since 2004:

1.24 (2004), 1.25 (2005), 1.26 (2006),  1.29 (2007), 1.28 (2008), 1.22 (2009), 1.15 (2010), 1.20 (2011)

Which suggests a slow positive creep of TFR up to the point of 2007-2008, when the recession hit, followed by a Tiger year double-whammy barely 2 years later. Meanwhile, the media continues to bombard us with fascinating who’s-who trivia of Dragon personalities, from Li Ka-Shing to Keanu Reeves, when they should have done the same for the Tiger year instead of perpetuating the bossy Tiger female stereotype. But is it truly a race effect? Let’s break it down.

In the 2010 Tiger year, the Chinese TFR hit 1.02, the Malays dipped rather dramatically to  1.65, while the Indians held steady at 1.13. Which means there was nothing special about the drop among the Chinese in 2009-2010 compared to the previous year ( a rate of -0.06); something else was amiss. In the last Dragon year in 2000, the reverse happened, but surprisingly not just for the Chinese. The other races seemed to respond to the Dragon’s roar as well, according to a ‘crude rate report’ charting birth rates from 1997 to 2006. But then it wasn’t just a Dragon year, it was the start of a new MILLENNIUM, and it would be interesting to see if any birth spike occurred 9 months post-Y2K.

Dragon spike for all 3 races

Only time will tell if 2012 breathes fire into the wombs of our women, whether Chinese, Malay or Indian. Meanwhile, the government should focus not just on generating babies or allowing the media to suggest that Dragon babies can grow up to become just like Professor X (Patrick Stewart), but retaining them when they grow older.

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Filed under: 1980s, 2000s, 2010, 2011, 2012, Babies, Chinese New Year, Festivals, Politicians, Public holidays, Superstitions | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Dragon babies are ‘incapable of hypocricy’

Posted on January 8, 2012 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Enter the dragon babies’, article by Judith Tan, 8 Jan 2012, Sunday Times

Claris Ong and Alexandra Chin, both 11 years old, are ‘Dragon babies’….The girls are outstanding by virtue of being very driven and independent – both qualities true to the nature of those born under that Chinese zodiac sign.

…Since ancient times, the Chinese have always thought a ‘Dragon child’ would bring luck to the family. This is because dragons symbolise traits such as dominance and ambition. According to geomancers, ‘Dragon children’ prefer to live by their own rules and, if left to their own devices, are usually successful.

They are also said to be passionate, driven, unafraid of challenges, and willing to take risks. But this same passion and enthusiasm can also leave ‘Dragons’ feeling exhausted and even unfulfilled. On the plus side, they are said to be sincere and incapable of hypocrisy. They can also be very persuasive, with an ability to wear down resistance through their intuitive and diplomatic nature. But they are also known to be very sensitive, sometimes cutting and stubborn, or even wilful and vindictive.

…The last Dragon Year in 2000 saw more than 46,000 births – up from an average 42,000 live births in 1999 and 2001. And in 1988, there were 52,957 babies born here, compared with 43,616 in 1987 and 47,669 in 1989.

There’s little tolerance  for science and logic when it comes to grounded tradition and mythology. It’s unlikely that people born in the Year of the Dragon are necessarily more successful or driven than people born in any other year, and anyone embarking on such a study would face a daunting task, not to mention suffer brickbats from geomancers whose very livelihood depends on telling Dragon baby parents what they’d love to hear. Of course any birth spike is music to our government’s ears, even if this was borne out of unrealistic expectations resulting in increased competition from maternity beds to nursery, school and job placings. It would help if Dragon baby parents were Dragons themselves to give their kids a headstart, assuming that all the character traits are true. So even if by celestial order Dragon babies are genetically programmed to lead by example and boss other zodiac animals around, the environmental pressure would put the NURTURE element of the ‘nature vs nurture’ argument to the ultimate test.

The opposite to the Dragon Baby boom effect is the Year of the Tiger, which saw dips in births over the past 3 Tiger years.  Which is strange since the attributes that lead to a Tiger baby’s success are similar to those of a Dragon. It’s also sexist to think less favourably of a Tiger woman, stereotyped as being fierce and wilful, than a Tiger Man, who’s courageous and dominating and would have been indistinguishable from the stereotype of his Dragon counterpart. Marriages are also down during Tiger years, and with our already dismal fertility rate, the last thing we’ll need is horoscope predictions turning into self-fulfilling prophecies. Our PM (A dragon himself) made a plea to parents to act normal during the inauspicious Tiger year in 2010, and not ‘cling on to superstitions’, but will probably remain silent about the exaggerated faith placed on Dragon children this CNY, no thanks to ST celebrating living proof of clever Dragon children and enticing gullible couples to rush headlong into marriage or birth without considering more practical issues like whether they have a roof over their head or not.

If you read horoscopes closely, you’ll realise how inconsistent and vague their personality attributes are, and often you’d find a bit of yourself in every zodiac animal, though we’re usually not interested in what other horoscopes have to say. It’s a classic mind-reading trick, relying on our tendency to agree furiously with one thing that speaks true of ourselves and forgetting about the others that don’t. In the 1950′s, a Dragon was considered ‘benevolent and lovable‘ and it would be a blessing to marry one. Today’s dragons can be too sensitive, wilful or even vindictive, though it doesn’t really matter if the shortcomings of a dragon change from one era to another. It’s still a DRAGON after all, worshipped to demigod status by Emperors of centuries past.

If you’re aiming to debunk such superstitious hokum, the first parameter that you may want to examine is how many gifted leaders out there actually belong to the Dragon cohort, in proportion to all other animals in the zodiac. Using this helpful Wiki on Dragon birthdates, I carried out a premonitory survey of my own, using prominent Chinese Singaporean figures (politicians mainly) as a very narrow gauge of what we define as success:

Past and president PMs, presidents

  • LEE HSIEN LOONG, PM of SINGAPORE (10 Feb 1952, WATER dragon). Even his name has a dragon character in it, adding to the divine mystique of his auspicious birth. Incidentally his father Lee Kuan Yew, born in Sept 1923 (PIG), wasn’t. Tony Tan Keng Yam, the current president of Singapore, missed the Dragon year by a SINGLE DAY (7 Feb 1940). Neither are Goh Chok Tong (1941, SNAKE), Ong Teng Cheong (1936) or Wee Kim Wee (1915).

Past and present ministers/MPs/politicians

  • KHAW BOON WAN, National Development Minister (8 Dec 1952), TAN CHENG BOCK, ex MP and presidential candidate (26 April 1940). But not George Yeo (1954), DPM Teo Chee Hean (1954),  Chee Soon Juan (1962), Tan Jee Say (1954), WP MP Chen Show Mao (1961) or Wong Kan Seng (1946).

Past and present women ministers/MPs/politicians

  • GRACE FU, Senior Minister of State (29 March 1964, WOOD dragon) This dragon lady  has been heckled recently for her comments on ministerial pay cuts. Firebrand Nicole Seah of NSP (1986) isn’t one, nor is Tin Pei Ling (1983), Lee Bee Wah (1960), late wife of LKY Kwa Gek Choo (1920), WP MP Sylvia Lim, or prolific author and critic Catherine Lim (1942).

Tycoons

  • KHOO TECK PUAT (13 Jan 1917)
  • NG TENG FONG (Unconfirmed, but he was born in  1928, a dragon year)

Miscellaneous celebrities who make unlikely dragons

  • STEVEN LIM, eyebrow stylist, dancer, all round entertainer (30 Aug 1976, FIRE DRAGON) and HENRY ‘ALAMAK’ THIA (25 Feb 1952, same birthday month as PM Lee).

Without going into formal statistics I think it’s quite fair to say that there’s nothing special about Dragon babies and any Dragon baby that emerges as the leader of a generation or a multi-billionaire is pure coincidence and any success alluded to one’s date of birth suffers from post-hoc fallacious reasoning, conveniently ignoring all the other little dragons who fail to live up to their parent’s expectations, as well as other factors accounting for one’s fortune. Of course if a dragon happens to fail miserably in life or becomes a YouTube laughing stock, then feng shui masters would put the blame on the actual DATE of birth, if not the time you emerged from your mother’s womb down to the millisecond.

It’s worth exploring, however, if the very selective pressure of dealing with the dragon baby boomers in school or work is itself a factor in driving dragons to excel, not so much because they’re born in a certain way, but because of a consequence of a belief in them performing in a certain way. Note that among all the zodiac animals, the Dragon is the only one that exists only as a figment of our imagination. The media getting all pumped up celebrating brilliant children who SO HAPPEN to be Dragon babies is perpetuating a deep-seated symptom of magical thinking, just like the magical creature behind it. You won’t see the same coverage for RAT babies, that’s for sure.

Postscript: It turns out that there has been a misconception of what makes a Dragon baby. According to a 29 Jan 2012 Sunday Times article, you’re not a Dragon baby this year until the ‘Li Chun’, or start of Spring festival, on Feb 4. AT 1824 HOURS. Which means there are people who’ve been associated with dragons, embellished with all the positive traits of dragons, but are actually RABBITS. This, of course, simply disproves the myth of zodiac signs influencing character.  Also thanks to ‘CY’ for pointing out that Tony Tan is in fact a dragon.

Filed under: 1950s, 2010, 2012, Babies, Chinese New Year, Kids, Local actors, Politicians, Singaporean men, Singaporean women, Superstitions | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Big strollers blocking MRT entrances

Posted on October 9, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Monster wheels’, 9 Oct 2011, article by Jane Ng, Lifestyle Sunday Times

Supersized strollers are getting on the nerves of commuters and shoppers. Fed-up folk have to dodge bulky baby buggies rolled out by pushy parents who at times behave like they and their little princes and princesses own the road.

These are not the slim-built push prams you see at the neighbourhood centre, but are rugged three or four-wheelers which can scale rough terrain with ease, if need be. But they seem to be the rage among modern mothers, never mind that their prices can go to more than $2,000 for a Stokke, a lifestyle stroller by a Norwegian company.

One commuter tired of push coming to shove is Ms Helen Lim, 63, a headhunter who takes the MRT to work every day. She sometimes finds her way blocked by big strollers at the entrance of a carriage. Ms Lim politely asks the parent to move the stroller aside, or shoos other passengers away from the carriage area designated for wheelchairs, so the pram can move there.

Although she takes the initiative to solve the problem, she is losing patience, and feels the situation is worsening. Speaking to LifeStyle, Ms Lim, who is not married, said she is ‘annoyed’, both at pram users and inconsiderate commuters.

‘Strollers are a hindrance when you don’t fold them up. They take up standing room and block entrances. Then there are passengers who are inconsiderate and don’t take the initiative to move in, so it makes the situation worse,’ she said.

Strollers or Stompers?

The futuristic Stokke pram looks like an all-terrain military-grade armed mobile unit that could transform into a battle exoskeleton out of Avatar, while the Bugaboo Bee stroller (see below) is a space-age utility vehicle that should have been featured in a Transformers movie. Both state-of-the-art baby accessories make parents heaving their kids around in a sling or backpack look Neanderthal in comparison. Ironically, prams models are given twee names like the Bugaboo ‘donkey’, ‘cameleon’,  ‘bee’ when in reality, ‘Goliath’ or ‘Devastator’ would be more fitting, judging by the number of toes being crushed by these marauding, mechanical beasts.

Bugaboo Autobot

Strollers are no longer ‘baby carriages’ like what they used to be in the past, now  sleek, portable cribs equipped with sexy, NASA-endorsed features that could also describe the specifications of a luxury sedan. I’ve no problem with parents  bringing infants around in these little makeshift trailer homes, but what’s really annoying is if they transport kids old enough to walk about on their own, more so if they are playing with Daddy’s iPhone in the comfort of the pram instead of sleeping. Prams are also formidable obstacles if they hoard aisles at a restaurant or food court, not just because they make  it completely inaccessible for you to get a table, but trying to move it would provoke an  angry, overprotective parent into calling the police on you for infant assault. You also don’t want some creepy design out of a horror movie like Rosemary’s Baby.

Evil burps

Even in the late forties, baby carriages were a relative luxury, with pram-beds available from $50. For the ‘Loveliest baby in the world’, you could get a Marmet folding pram for a bargain of $179 in the early sixties, though design-wise it looked rather similar to a wheelchair (see below). In the late eighties you could get a ‘Geometric Convertible Stroller Bed’ for $239.95 at Toys R Us.

Hospital grade

Today, for a cool $2k you can get a Stokke pram/stroller which not only fulfills the basic function of baby ambulation, but also aids the ‘healthy development of bones, joints and muscles’. It comes with a ‘cocoon visor’ too. So, it’s not just any ordinary stroller/pram, it’s an ergonomic growth-accelerator and incubator that looks like a cyber-nanny as well. Being accused of helming Mad Max- style battering rams by irate commuters is a hefty price to pay when you’re a busy parent and bulldozing your way through the crowd is the only way to get things done. If the government won’t do anything about overcrowding or baby-friendly spaces we only have technology to look to if there’s any hope of miniaturisation, or at least putting our kids on robotic walkers with intuitive (and safe!) parent-obeying AI. Unfortunately, when it comes to baby comfort and safety, bigger does seem to be ‘better’, to kiasu parents at least. Or you could blame Battleship Potemkin, a 1925 classic which features a scene of a renegade baby carriage tumbling down the stairs, scaring parents the world over into buying more expensive, and presumably safer, prams. Also, nobody wants to be seen with the pram equivalent of a newspaper pick-up van next to a monster truck.

Baby makes Contact

Filed under: 1940s, 1960s, 1980s, 2011, Babies, Kids, MRT, Parenting, Strollers/Prams | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

My son knows how to split an infinitive

Posted on September 21, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Mum’s the word on smarter children’, 21 Sept 2011, ST Forum

(DR Lee Siew Peng): THE announcement of my engagement to a Caucasian surprised many who had accepted my status of being ‘on the shelf’ (‘A PhD’s fine, but what about love and babies?’; Sept 6).

It is my PhD that is currently on the shelf as after more than 10 years as a full-time mother, it is almost impossible to return to academia. Many intelligent Singapore women will recognise this problem: most Singapore men are not inclined to marry women they consider to be cleverer.

This letter not only deserves to be reproduced in full, but given a piece of my Singaporean MALE non-ANGMOR, non PHD mind every couple of paragraphs. It’s baffling how such a piece of self-trumpeting, indulgent, I would dare say vulgar display of blinkered arrogance eluded the forum editor’s brainstem, an organ that Dr Lee herself probably left ‘on the shelf’ along with her PhD. The word ‘Caucasian’ appears only once in the entire article, the first line in fact, which pretty much sets an unnerving, emasculating tone for the remainder of the letter if you suffer the misfortune of being an egotistical Singaporean male who’s uncomfortable with smarter women. Coupled with the location where Dr Lee is based (London) in the sign-off, what we have right at the outset of this letter is an all too familiar scenario of an educated housewife married into a cushy foreign family, living in a foreign land, and telling Singaporeans,most of whom can’t afford to live comfortably off a sole breadwinner, how to choose their mates or raise smart children when she’s thousands of miles away and not adding her prodigious offspring to OUR gene pool instead.

I remember the look of one man who chatted me up after I had made a witty remark at a lecture. When I told him I was (then) a master’s degree student he – literally – turned away. Spot the difference: My husband (who holds a Bachelor of Science degree), tells people he is clever enough to have married me.

Here we are given another unwanted glimpse of the writer’s solid credentials through a rather useless anecdote. A pHD AND MASTERS holder. And she’s speaking on behalf of her husband, who ONLY has a BSc. Most people use emotional language when asked why we choose to spend the rest of our lives with someone, like ‘She makes me happy’, ‘She’s my soulmate, or the easy way out – ‘Because I love her’. When a man says he’s ‘clever enough’ to marry you, it suggests calculatedness and ulterior motive, especially if you’re a double degree holder and potential high earner. It’s fortunate that in this case, Dr Lee isn’t being treated like a sugar mommy, though the reason she gives for her man marrying ‘upwards’ isn’t the first thing men would consider when it comes to dating smarter women. Evolutionary scientists have their own theories on our aversion towards smart women, that men are hardwired providers and are attracted to women who appear to need our protection, though that’s still debatable considering how rampant gender reversals has become in recent years. But why pick on guys only? How about women refusing to marry ‘downwards’? What if smarter women just happen to be ‘pickier’?

Studies have shown consistently that a child’s educational attainment correlates with that of his mother’s. My son’s IQ is significantly higher than that of either of his parents. (I am convinced that 11 months of breast-feeding also helped.)

I might have opted out of a career where I could inspire many young people on to their own doctorates, but my son has also benefited much from our discussions on the scientific method, statistics in research, Descartes, splitting an infinitive (and atom), and so on. He is so far ahead of his cohort that he has skipped one year in Maths and is being ‘extended’ in other subjects within his normal classes.

There’s no mention of how old Dr Lee’s son is and he could well be a amateur professor of Nuclear Physics who splits atoms as a hobby for all we know, though what’s suggested here is that forsaking her career and focussing on bringing up a Megamind at home is well worth the sacrifice. What’s totally missing really, besides all the motherly nurturing, reading scientific journals instead of bedtime stories and 11 months of breastmilk, is the role of the FATHER in raising an intelligent child. That aside, more bragging here not just of her son’s achievements and the fact that he knows what an infinitive is (What the hell is this, Forum editor, a letter or a grammar thesis?), but also the IQ-boosting powers of her breast milk. Trust a pHD to summon the  ‘Studies have shown’ fallacy as nonchalantly as saying ‘The sun has been known to rise from the east’. Show me the studies before you tell me what they show.Does this apply across the board in societies where men are still predominantly the bread-winners i.e better educated ones? Have these studies factored in median income as a possible determinant? Perhaps the writer means ’1 STUDY has shown’, the one that she has conducted on her own son.

My points are:

  • First, Singapore men who wish to have clever children should consider marrying women who are better educated or cleverer (remember, one does not always imply the other), just as short men should marry taller wives if they want taller sons because sons are rarely shorter than their mothers.
  • Second, it is all right for well-educated mothers to stay at home to care for their children. Their education will not be wasted in the instruction of their own children.
  • Third, Mr Lee Kuan Yew first alerted us to our limited gene pool in 1984.
  • Fourth, what has been done since to preserve and enhance this gene pool? Has the foreign talent initiative superseded this urgency?

Finally, a lack of support for well-educated mothers who wish to take career breaks – which can only benefit their offspring, with or without breast-feeding – is myopic.

If a genetic defect suddenly struck the Y chromosome and all men went extinct, Dr Lee here stands a good chance of being Empress and Queen Mother of the world. She doesn’t need the male phenotype, the brawn, the musk, the low voice and hairy chest. She just needs a cupful of sperm of minimum BSc calibre to manufacture her little baby geniuses.  Though there may be some truth in  smart housewives raising smart children, this may not correlate so much with intelligence or educational status as much as the greater time housewives spend IN GENERAL on their own children compared to men. Who’s to say that a pHD househusband wouldn’t raise a genius as well?  Dr Lee has completely ignored the roles of society, nutrition (other than breast milk) and even luck in determining successful offspring, which is in line with LKY’s ideas on social engineering and why he urges pHD female students to get boyfriends. In fact, she has one-upped LKY’s call to propagate, by saying that not only should pHD women marry, but they should be stay at home moms/tutors as well. The fact is, you don’t need a damn pHD to teach your kids who Descartes was. Google nanny can jolly well (split infinitive) do that just fine.

Short men don’t marry tall women just to have children taller than them, nor do they marry smarter, more successful women just so they can have precocious kids to brag about in the ST forum page.  Men marry the woman they love, probably  just as often the woman they most want to have sex with, not just for her tall or smart genes but rather those that signal a state of physical health (i.e looks good, or at least looking like a human female) or a personality trait like kindness, though LKY’s daughter Lee Wei Ling would beg to differ, having deduced that men value intelligence more than looks. And it’s rather disappointing for all of the writer’s theories on breast milk and split infinitives, she’s hasn’t the slightest clue of how we men tick at all.

Filed under: 2011, Babies, Kids, Marriage, Parenting, Singaporean men, Singaporean women | Tagged: , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

LKY wants PhD girl to get a boyfriend

Posted on September 9, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ‘My mind was a total blank’, 8 Sept 2011, article by Koh Hui Theng, New Paper

SHE had a burning question for former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew last night. Given the big influx of immigrants here in a short time, and a dilution of the national identity, what can we do to create a sense of belonging and foster social cohesiveness, she asked.

Singaporean Joan Sim, 27, a PhD student at Nanyang Technological University’s (NTU) School of Biological Sciences, thought it was a straightforward query and expected an equally direct reply.

…Following her question, Mr Lee spoke about the fast ageing population. That, plus the drop in the fertility rate, are major worries for Singapore’s leaders.

Last year, the total fertility rate – which measures the average number of children born to a woman over her childbearing years – was at an all-time low of 1.15. Mr Lee said: “The birth rate today, the fertility rate, is 1.01. In other words, for every couple, you have 1.01 babies.

…“How old are you now?” he wanted to know. “Twenty-seven,” she replied.

The queries came thick and fast: Are you married? (No) When will you finish your PhD? (In two years) So you’ll be 29 then. Do you have a boyfriend? (No) That was when Mr Lee drew attention to the biological clock and a woman’s child-bearing years. After 35 (years old), the dangers of having children with Down syndrome rises, he said.

“My advice, please don’t waste time. I hope you get your PhD and your boyfriend,” he added.

The audience laughed loudly. Miss Sim turned red. She told The New Paper: “It was very, very embarrassing. At that moment, I wanted to hug myself and disappear.

“My mind turned into a total blank when he started asking those questions.”

It was a case of an NTU forum intended for intelligent and insightful discussion turned into a Chinese New Year reunion dinner grilling session writ large. Of course it’s normal for old people to have such simplistic views of romance and marriage, but LKY threatening and publicly humiliating a brave and smart woman reveals a deep, gnawing agenda for educated single women which he has been espousing since 1983. The reason for this ‘kah-poh’-ish enthusiasm is simple enough, that this is a woman with a PhD, letting her smart genes go to painful waste. Though he did not specify that Joan should marry a man of equal stature, his staunch Darwinian beliefs turned eugenics worshiping reared its ugly head in a National Day Rally 28 years ago, when he blamed the future dip in our talent pool on educated women choosing to have less children, or none at all (Get Hitched!..and don’t stop at one, 15 Aug 1983, ST)

…PM sees depletion of talent pool in 25 years unless better educated wed and have more children. Think about it, says the Prime Minister: If you are well educated, it is your DUTY to get married and have children.

…”For every two graduates, there will be one graduate, and for every two uneducated workers, there will be three…We will be unable to maintain our present standards..Levels of competence will decline. Our economy will falter, the administration will suffer, and society will decline (Full text on LKY’s speech here).

Such mechanistic ideas on social engineering led to the sterilisation incentive scheme in 1984, just a year after he made the above speech, in an ambitious ‘God-playing’ attempt to keep the ‘uneducated malaise’ in check. 25 years on and we know such tactics have not only failed miserably, but probably backfired and made the situation worse, with the influx of immigrants used as an excuse to buffer this ‘talent pool’. But no one would dare bring up the past without having the ISD come by with an invitation to a chit-chat session over tea the next morning. What LKY didn’t take into account in his back-of-the-envelope calculations, is that even our imported ‘talent’ aren’t staying here long enough to relieve the brain drain, especially in the realm of scientific expertise. Not to mention our homegrown talents deciding to apply their skills elsewhere, which makes LKY’s hard mathematical logic as useful as recruiting more rain-dancers to summon  showers to relieve a drought, when the real problem lies in the very soil of our harvest.

Incidentally LKY’s only daughter Lee Wei Ling is still single and she’s more than half a century old, and if Joan wanted to get even she could have rebutted the old man on his own failure to ‘harvest’ at least one more graduate grandchild out of his stubbornly single daughter, though I suspect the real reason why Lee Wei Ling never married, other than personal choice and the fact that she looks like a teenage boy, is because no man in his right mind would ever want LKY as his father-in-law, even if the old man were undisputed King of the Land and needed an heir to the throne.

Here’s what Wei Ling shared on remaining single (Why I  choose to remain single, 9 Sept 2009, ST)

…I had my first date when I was 21 years old. He was a doctor in the hospital ward I was posted to. We went out to a dinner party. I noted that the other guests were all rich socialites .

I dropped him like a hot potato. In 2005 , while on an African safari with a small group of friends, one of them, Professor C. N. Lee, listed the men who had tried to woo me. There were three besides the first.

Two were converted into friends and another, like the first, was dropped. I am now 54 years old and happily single. In addition to my nuclear family, I have a close circle of friends.

Most of my friends are men. But my reputation is such that their female partners would never consider me a threat. More than 10 years ago, when there was still a slim chance I might have got married, my father told me: “Your mother and I could be selfish and feel happy that you remain single and can look after us in our old age. But you will be lonely.”

Lee Wei Ling’s luck with eligible equals is living proof that LKY’s call for graduates to go forth and multiply is easier said than done. Joan shouldn’t take such teasing to heart and just treat it with the same pinch of salt as one would regard the self-indulgent proselytizing  of a granduncle with too much time and experience on his hands, that it’s not all unmarried graduate women’s fault that we’re facing a fertility crisis. Singaporeans, in general, are just not having much sex at all. Meanwhile, we’re hearing more coming out of LKY’s restless mouth than any other politician since his retirement. Someone get the man a job. Anything except Minister Matchmaker, please.

Filed under: 1980s, 2000s, 2011, Babies, Marriage, Politicians, Singaporean women | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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