Nothing risqué, nothing gained. – US theatre critic, Alexander Woollcott

Sex without love is an empty experience but as empty experiences go, it’s one of the best. – Woody Allen 

Queen Victoria, who was the UK’s monarch when Rudyard Kipling was warbling about the sun “never setting” on the British Empire, wasn’t particularly impressed by a baby’s looks: “An ugly baby is a very nasty object – and the prettiest is frightful.”

She should talk: the reason, for her presumably plain offspring, usually stared back at her every morning. Still, it’s a strange sentiment from a person who had nine children over 17 years. 

Clearly, she wasn’t averse to the practice but deplored its outcome. 

A person like Victoria, however, might have been welcomed in present-day Singapore by no less than a brass band. Going by its outcomes, Singaporeans aren’t particularly interested in multiplying. 

It’s true. At 1.3 births per woman, the wealthy city-state has the fifth lowest fertility rate in the world.

Going forward it leads to an aging population and an increasing dependence on imported foreign labour. In cases like Japan where the problem has been protracted and, unlike Singapore, immigration to replace the population isn’t allowed, primary schools are being closed for want of enrolment. Japan has a fertility rate of 1.34 babies per woman. 

Malaysia is, slowly but surely, heading there.   According to the news-portal FMT, the fertility rate in 2023 reached its lowest in five decades, with 1.6 children for every woman compared to 1.7 babies per woman in 2022. Statistically speaking, the replacement rate of any population is 2.1 children for every family. 

Singapore has tried various incentives to encourage more births including tax incentives and outright cash handouts: citizen receive SGD10, 000 for every new child. They have all failed, a lesson Japan could have shared and Dr Mahathir should have noted vis-à-vis his hare-brained idea, in the 1980s, of a 70-million population policy for the country.

You can’t foist these sort of policies on a populace. An inbuilt, “quality of life” barometer is inherent in the human experience and rising education and affluence has all but entrenched the notion of small families.

Man has proved himself admirable in that sense. At one time, it was thought  that humanity would ultimately starve  because populations grew geometrically while the food supply expanded arithmetically, The notion  didn’t take into account human ingenuity and its discovery of technology.  

What remains, however, is a dreadful irony. There is starvation is some parts of Africa while obesity and diabetes are becoming serious problems in Malaysia. 

But the demographic trend is here to stay. Indeed, a 2022 Pew Research Centre study using US data has indicated, for the first time in human history, that the world’s population will stop growing by the end of this century. 

For Malaysia it appears recreation has supplanted procreation and we’ve come full circle as it were. It isn’t such a bad thing and I suppose we should consider ourselves blessed: it is a problem of plenty and numerical proof that we are steadily developing and getting more affluent.

That is not to say that Malaysians, or Singaporeans for that matter, aren’t engaging in sex any more. Like Victoria, one suspects they aren’t doing it any less either.  

ENDS