9 - Uplifting Fertility of Better-Educated Women

Summary

INTRODUCTION

After the attainment of replacement fertility in 1975, no changes to the national population control programme were made until the mid-1980s when measures designed to encourage the better-educated women to produce more babies and the lesser-educated to bear fewer babies were introduced. These measures were meant to influence the quality rather than the quantity of the future population to ensure an adequate supply of talented people for the small island state. The genesis of the shift towards the qualitative aspect of the population can be traced to the traditional address delivered by the Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, at the National Day Rally attended by a gathering of People's Action Party members and other specially invited guests on 14 August 1983. Appendix A reproduces the full text of his speech.

Touching on the prevailing problems and issues confronting Singapore, he talked at considerable length about the differences in fertility according to the educational level of mothers as reflected in the 1980 Population Census data. He also cited the findings, particularly those of Thomas Bouchard of the University of Minnesota, which seem to indicate that the intelligence of a child is determined more by nature (about 80 per cent) than by nurture (about 20 per cent). He expressed his concern about the lopsided pattern of procreation in Singapore where the better-educated mothers were bearing too few children, which would eventually have the undesirable effect of lowering the quality of the population in the long run. He emphasized the need to change “our policies, and try to reshape our demographic configuration so that our better-educated women will have more children to be adequately represented in the next generation”.

The Prime Minister's remarks on the above population issue in the much-heralded National Day Rally beamed live over television and reported prominently in the newspapers provoked a great debate among the general public. The debate centred on the validity of the hypothesis that the intelligence of the children is determined by the educational level of their mothers and that intelligence is dependent more on nature than nurture. As to be expected, there was no consensus among the people regarding these somewhat controversial and emotional issues.