"SM Goh: Help Solve The Puzzle of Missing Babies" in ST today
Puzzle? What Puzzle!?That we are having fewer babies now is the repercussion of short-sighted and ill-conceived policies of the past.
Remember how swiftly the Family Planning Board was set up to implement the Birth Control Policy and the vigor with which various campaigns were organized to drive home the point that “Girl or Boy Two is Enough” and the “Stop at Two” admonition? Remember the blatant discrimination against failure to stop at two?
Remember the argument that with limited land and no natural resources, a population explosion spelled economic catastrophe for the country?
Remember the incentives to husbands to go under the knife, never mind the evidence that vasectomy, though reversible, does not always restore fertility.
Remember the jaundiced favoritism accorded graduate mothers in the name of eugenics and how young couples were advised against marrying too young.
We DO remember. In short, ways and means were resorted to to bring the population to a standstill and in the process the baby was thrown out with the bath water. Do we know how many pregnancies were aborted that otherwise might not?
The focus is now on couples who are DINKS, i.e, with "double income no kids. Only they should procreate or copulate. The State has no wish to be left holding babies of couples of lesser means or inferior genes, you know.
posted by Victor Lai @ 5:44 PM
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