Give single mums by choice a chance By Zuraidah Ibrahim
Publisher:The Straits Times - Publication Date: 19-06-2007 There is a park in a town in America where almost every evening, you can see many white mums playing with their Chinese babies.
It is fairly common for women in that well-schooled area to turn to adoption. Many are single women, well-educated and successful, who had assumed they would cross the milestones of love, marriage and motherhood - except that their life journeys somehow bypassed the first two.
Other than adoption, there are women choosing to bear their own children without men by their side.
Is becoming a single mother the solution for women who want children but cannot find the right mate? Is it time society becomes more accepting of such family units?
It remains a controversial idea today, nearly 15 years after the issue was discussed openly here, when then-prime minister Goh Chok Tong rejected it in the strongest terms and held that fathers must be made responsible for their children. The Housing Board then stopped allowing single mothers to purchase flats direct from the Housing Board.
A week ago, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew was asked a question on education while in Russia, a country with low fertility rates coupled with declining life expectancy (a Russian man lives up to age 59, like those in sub-Saharan Africa). Last year, Russia introduced baby-making incentives.
Lee recounted the experience of Singapore, where the Asian male was reluctant to marry a more successful female. Just over two-thirds of graduate males marry their educational equals now. This is better than the 37 per cent in 1983, when Lee first talked about the problem, but it still leaves a sizeable group of educated women unmarried.
It is a worldwide phenomenon, but MM Lee put it in a way that only he could get away with: "You are reproducing the next generation excluding your best mothers for the next generation. It's like taking your best cows or best mares out of the population pool. It doesn't make sense."
Not quite the analogy I would use, but his next point was thought-provoking: "In the West, they are now encouraging single parenthood, women have children without husbands. That's one solution. I am not sure that Singapore society is ready for that. But maybe that's better than having no children from intelligent women."
No doubt, there are many Singaporeans who would reject the idea outright. Some would raise traditional or religious objections, saying that embracing single motherhood is against the ways of nature and god. If a woman can't find a mate, it could be natural selection's way of telling her that she is not fit to contribute to the survival of the species. Or perhaps she just has not tried hard enough. In any case, it would be argued, condoning single motherhood violates the sanctity of marriage.
It will be difficult to persuade Singaporeans steeped in these traditional values to look more sympathetically at women who opt for single motherhood. However, the indisputable fact is that times have changed.
The mores that traditionalists are reaching for were established at a time before education became a universally recognised right and before survival required earning a living in cities. School and work have delayed marriage. The window of opportunity for having a child has dramatically narrowed. As a woman's biological clock runs down, is it so difficult to understand that she may not want to place all her eggs, literal and metaphorical, in the basket of a marriage that may never happen?
However, other Singaporeans might argue that opting for single parenthood is selfish and unfair to the child, who deserves the advantages of a two-parent family. This camp can furnish reams of statistics to back its case, showing that the progeny of single-parent families are more prone to all kinds of behavioural problems.
The biggest flaw in such studies is that they are skewed by the large number of teenage single mothers and abandoned women who may indeed be ill-equipped to deal with parenting.
It remains an open question whether a woman who makes a careful and conscious decision to have a child would create any less nurturing a household than married couples who simply go with the flow and drift into parenthood. Of course, having more than one adult around would be a great advantage, but one should not confuse single motherhood with having a single-adult household. In the Singapore context, it is quite likely that a single woman who chooses to have a child will not be raising the kid single-handedly. The household may include members of her extended family, or a significant partner.
The subject is hardly ever discussed in Singapore, and numbers are hard to come by. But in the United States, a religious society, out-of-wedlock births reached a record high in 2005, with nearly four in 10 babies born in 2005. The trend was not fuelled by teens, who made up a quarter of the mothers, but by those in their 30s and 40s.
Most are not men-haters out to undermine two-parent families, according to Rosanna Hertz, author of Single By Chance, Mothers By Choice: How Women Are Choosing Parenthood Without Marriage And Creating The New American Family.
She found that many grew up believing they would get married, but the right man was just nowhere to be found. After a baby, they continued to search for a partner to love them and their child. Some get their child's biological father to become involved in his upbringing. Others recruit other men, like friends, brothers, uncles, to become part of their families' lives. In short, they spare no effort to raise the child with the best chances in life possible, and they are not deluded into thinking they can manage single-handedly.
When you consider Singapore's baby-making crisis, the need to de-stigmatise single mothers by choice, whether through adoption or other means, takes on an added national significance. Singapore faces one of the worst total fertility rates in the world, near the bottom of international rankings.
Many policies are in place to redress this, from baby incentives to encouraging immigration. But why not also consider making it less daunting for single women who want to have children by choice?
Thankfully there are no legal restrictions on adoption. But single mothers cannot buy flats directly from the HDB. They also lose out on housing grants married couples get.
But one of the most problematic areas is in egg and sperm donation. Egg and sperm banks here are meant only for married couples. Any move to change this would raise some legal and social issues, but it is one that society should not be afraid to discuss. With the right protocols, just as already exist for adoption, the potential for abuse can be checked.
As for those who view such moves as violating their religious convictions, one would expect from them nothing less than to try to persuade the rest of Singapore why their stand makes sense even for those outside their faith. But no one group should dictate its standards to others.
It is something that is hard for society to condone. It is equally hard for governments to make an unequivocal stand on single motherhood by choice. The least all parties can do is to be less judgmental and less punitive, whether through policy or social isolation.