Population planning in Singapore
[2] Following World War II's end in 1945, the growth of Singapore's population was assessed to be unsustainable for its economic prospects; there were about 1 million born between the years of 1947 and 1964, with total live births increasing by 58%.
The associated risks of overpopulation including resource depletion, environmental degradation, heightened unemployment, and increased costs of living prompted the government's growth-culling response.
In 1947, the British Housing Committee Report noted Singapore had "one of the world's worst slums – 'a disgrace to a civilised community'", and the average person per building density was 18.2 by 1947.
Such a trend would lead to population overcrowding, which was thought to overwhelm employment opportunities and social services in education, health and sanitation.
In September 1965 the Minister of Health, Yong Nyuk Lin, submitted a white paper to Parliament, recommending a Five-year Mass Family Planning programme that would reduce the birth rate to 20.0 per thousand individuals by 1970.
[7] Initially allocated a budget of $1 million SGD for the entire programme, the SFPPB faced a resistant population, but eventually serviced over 156,000.
Fearing that Singapore's growing population might overburden the developing economy, Lee started a vigorous Stop at Two family planning campaign.
[7][10] The government also added a gradually increasing array of incentives and disincentives between 1968 and 1973, penalising parents for having more than two children, raising the per-child costs of each additional child:[7][11] The Singapore Family Planning and Population Board created a large array of public education material for the Stop-at-Two campaign, in one of the early examples of the public social engineering campaigns the government would continue to implement (Speak Mandarin, Speak Good English, National Courtesy, Keep Singapore Clean and Toilet Flushing Campaigns) that would lead to its reputation as "paternalistic" and "interventionist" in social affairs.
Many other posters from the "iconic" campaign included similar themes of being content with two girls, to combat the common trend in developing Asian societies for families with only daughters to continue "trying for a boy".
In addition to promoting just having two children, the government encouraged individuals to delay having their second child and to marry late, reinforcing the inevitable demographic transition.
The campaign was known to target the uneducated in particular; Lee believed that, "Free education and subsidised housing lead to a situation where the less economically productive people ... are reproducing themselves at [a higher rate]."
[20] The government justified its social policy as a means of encouraging the poor to concentrate their limited resources on nurturing their existing children, making them more likely to be capable, productive citizens.
Furthermore, the so-called "demographic gift" was occurring in Singapore as with other countries; increases in income, education and health and the role of women in the workforce were strongly correlated to levels of low population growth.
Such a trend would run antithetical to his demographic policy, and part of this failure, Lee conjectured, was "the apparent preference of male university graduates for less highly educated wives".
[7] Starting 1984, the government of Singapore gave education and housing priorities, tax rebates and other benefits to mothers with a university degree, as well as their children.
[23] Many incentives were given to graduate women to marry and give birth to produce babies which were believed to be 'highly intelligent' to maximise the talent pool in Singapore.
Women without O-Level qualifications, deemed low-income and lowly educated, were offered by the government seven days' paid sick leave and $10,000 SGD in cash incentives to voluntarily undergo the sterilisation procedure.
[7] The new policy took into account Singapore's falling fertility rate and its increased proportion of the elderly, but was still concerned with the "disproportionate procreation" of the educated versus the uneducated, and discouraged having more than two children if the couple did not have sufficient income, to minimise the amount of welfare aid spent on such families.
[citation needed] In October 1987, future Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, then a young Brigadier-General, exhorted Singaporeans to procreate rather than "passively watch ourselves going extinct".
[28] The modern SDU, renamed the Social Development Network in 2009, encourages all Singaporean couples to procreate and marry to reverse Singapore's negative replacement rate.
Some of the social welfare, dating and marriage encouragement, and family planning policies are also managed by the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports.
To the researchers of the study, the methods used in 1987 to attempt to reverse the falling birth rate was a demonstration of "the government's [continued] assumption" that citizens were receptive towards monetary incentives and administrative allocation of social services when it came to family planning.
Such measures include promoting workplaces that encourage spending time with the family, and creating a "Romancing Singapore Campaign" that "[directly avoided being linked] to pro-children and pro-family initiatives," since "people get turned off" when the government appears to intervene in such intimate social affairs as marriage.
