Singapore Changes Its Tune: “Stop at Two” Now Raps “Make a Baby Tonight”
By Mary Theroux • Thursday August 9, 2012 12:55 PM PDT • 5 Comments
Poster from Singapore's Anti-Child Ad Campaign. Bad Government Policy is Hard to Reverse.
Reader advisory: the following is rated PG-13
Today is the anniversary of Singapore’s independence, and they’re celebrating by urging citizens to make a baby. With headlines like “Thursday’s the Day to Go All the Way for Civic Duty in Singapore,” and a new commercial rap video produced by Mentos to “Get Your National Night On,” Singapore is fighting a battle with one of the lowest birth rates in the world.
What a difference 40 years make.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Singapore’s government was in the forefront of Malthusian fears (flavored with eugenics), with a population control campaign for residents—especially low-income and less-educated—to Stop at Two and then get sterilized (at right).
China just might want to take notice.
Oh, and we might want to take notice, too: is the Obamacare contraception mandate, rolled out August 1, a bit of the same?
Maybe we ought to take a lesson from Singapore and reconsider: Big Brother doesn’t know best, and such decisions are best left to families.
What a rad concept.
Here’s the video, now going viral:
Tags: Children, China, Civil Liberties, Civil Society, Culture, Family, Liberty, Morality, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Propaganda, Uncategorized, Women 
Mary,
Yes we all know you hate the current President, but seriously wanting health insurance to include birth control isn’t even remotely the same as mandating family size. Not only that such a policy isn’t even on the table. There are a lot of reason to not like a long of things going on in Washington, but when you create such imaginary boogeyman arguments, you discredit everything you say.
It seems your sense of “liberty” is for the government to outlaw everything the right-wing culture warriors don’t like. Or maybe the government should mandate more children?? Yes. that would make it less intrusive!
Should the government tell private businesses what products they should sell – NO, but this type of ignorant fear mongering you seemed to be engaged in is shameful.
Frank | Aug 9, 2012 | Reply
Hi, Frank,
I don’t hate the current president. I don’t think any human should have the power of the current and recent presidents—please see: “Emergency Powers Spell Corrosion of Liberty and Safety“—nor do I believe the president or the state has any proper role in matters of population control and reproduction.
I’m all for health insurance including birth control. I doubt there’s an insurance plan today that doesn’t, but every individual is free to check her policy to make sure. I’m all against the state mandating that we all pay the entire cost of every woman’s birth control—I don’t need subsidizing, nor do the majority of women. As I develop further in some of my pieces cited below, we can easily and without a one-size-fits-all federal mandate deal with the individual cases of those who do need assistance in meeting contraceptive costs they are not able to bear.
I do not know to what you are referring when you claim I’m advocating, “the government to outlaw everything the right-wing culture warriors don’t like.” Could you please specify what you believe I’m advocating be outlawed?
Rather, I’m advocating no laws in any of these matters.
My more complete commentary on the contraceptive mandate can be read here:
“God, Women and the Nanny State”
“ConGameCare”
“God and Woman in the Nanny State”
I think there is more than a little eugenics behind the inclusion of the contraceptive mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. As I said in the last post listed above:
I also think there is a great deal of politics behind it—as evidenced by the great deal of political hay being made, with, for example, the president being introduced by Sandra Fluke in his campaign stop in Colorado yesterday:
Is the recent presidential agenda a politicized attempt to create a coalition large enough to secure reelection?
Women, courted with the contraceptive mandate;
Gays, courted with the endorsement of gay marriage;
Hispanics, courted with visas for those brought into the country illegally as children
This is what politicians do—Republican and Democrat. I prefer to call them on it.
Previous posts regarding one-child policies include:
Keeping the Climate Safe from Too Many Brown Babies
30 Years Later: The Academe as Refuge for Anti-Abortion Protest?
In any event, I hope this clarifies matters for you, and please let me know if not.
With best wishes,
Mary
Mary Theroux | Aug 9, 2012 | Reply
If it were true that Singapore believed that big brother doesn’t know best, then they wouldn’t be telling people to have babies. It’s the flip side of the same reproductive coin. They can always change their minds next year.
Elizabeth | Aug 10, 2012 | Reply
Mary,
You say (in your answer to Frank) that you are all for health insurance’s covering birth control, but against the fact that You and everyone who’s not in need of this benefit have to pay for it to cover the costs?
The idea with a welfare system is to give everyone the same (or at least somewhat equal) opportunities to get education, health care a.s.o. – Including birth control in these benefits doesn’t raise the costs for each single person with a significant number.
You say “I don’t need subsidizing, nor do the majority of women.” How can you tell?
There are plenty of hungry children in the US today witnessing the opposite; women who couldn’t afford birth control (or weren’t educated about it) and even less can afford having children.
You also mention: “And if “free” pregnancy prevention and termination don’t solve “the problem,” what then?”
Let me ask this question back to you: “What if ‘free’ pregnancy prevention and termination DOES solve part of the problem?”
No one will know before we tried, and I believe strongly that with a nation wide insurance covering birth control there is a greater chance that your country is able and will take care of those who already are born (a greater share of welfare), and a salvation for the hundreds of thousand children who would’ve been born in to a living hell of poverty, starvation and crime.
There are worse things one could pay taxes for!
Lisa L | Aug 10, 2012 | Reply
Thank you, Lisa.
The contraceptive mandate makes all birth control “free” to everyone, not just the “needy.” Middle and upper-income women don’t need our birth control subsidized by the working class, as this mandate does, and doing so will raise costs for everyone. Middle and upper-income women are not the ones having unintended pregnancies. Thus the mandate as crafted is a waste of (scarce) money that could be directed to the actual problem, and is why I contend it has more to do with politics than solving the problem.
Further, in our supposedly-enlightened age we don’t have to solve problems through trial and error—we can apply our reason and science (and, yes, even social sciences like economics have laws that actually relate to reality) to devise solutions; we can, in fact, “know before we tried.”
Throughout time and across cultures, the relatively well off have been bemoaning the poor having too many babies. It has been the driver of everything from the eugenics movement, to Planned Parenthood, to population control policies like Singapore’s 40 years ago, and China’s and India’s today. 30 years ago, Americans decided that the solution was to provide sex education in schools—clearly the poor were having babies because they didn’t know where they come from—and to make abortion legal and readily available. The birth rate among poor unmarried women and girls has since instead exploded, as has the abortion rate:
OK, we tried that experiment and it didn’t work, so the popular theory now is that “they” need free birth control. But there is actually quite ready access to low- and no-cost birth control and abortion today, and it is not reducing the rate of births and abortion among the target group.
Since the primary cause of childhood poverty is living in a single-parent home, and since the primary population having “unintended” pregnancies are the poor and less-educated, policies that address poverty and education will thus likely achieve better population results than “free” birth control. The primary deterrent to unintended pregnancy is economic opportunity: those for whom having a baby reduces their opportunities tend to use birth control. Those for whom having a baby does not make an appreciable difference in their future opportunities have more babies.
We may have universal sex education, but our educational system in this country is otherwise criminal. We are producing a class of citizens with little to no chance of success in a modern economy. In addition, we are erecting increasing barriers to enterprise: from byzantine licensing laws, including for activities such as hair braiding, to impossible permitting processes for starting a new business.
We all like easy fixes, but free birth control is not going to fix the problem of too many children being born in poverty. It is time for us to stop falling for simplistic, politicized policies that don’t address actual causes, and agitate for an end to an educational system that keeps students ignorant and economic barriers that especially hurt the poor.
I encourage you to read the links I have provided, and hope this addresses your questions.
With best wishes,
Mary
Mary Theroux | Aug 11, 2012 | Reply