Donald Low wants us to stop attacking Indranee Rajah for being single and childless. He’s not wrong. But he’s defending the wrong argument.<\/p>\n
Low, a prominent economist and academic, took to social media to rebuke critics of Minister Indranee’s appointment to chair the new Marriage and Parenthood workgroup \u2014 announced just as Singapore recorded a\u00a0historic low Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 0.87<\/a>, the worst figure the nation has ever seen.<\/p>\n “You sound like a misogynistic old man,” he wrote, arguing that the real problem is her worldview, not her marital status.<\/p>\n Former NMP Calvin Cheng agreed, pointing out that it is precisely the unmarried and childless \u2014 those who need persuading \u2014 whose perspectives matter most.<\/p>\n They are correct that the “she’s not a parent” attack is reductive and lazy. But in making that valid point, both men have inadvertently built a shield around a minister whose record deserves no such protection.<\/p>\n The criticism of Indranee was never really about her personal life. It was always about her professional conduct. Her marital status is a symptom, not a cause.<\/p>\n The cause is a five-year pattern of policy \u2014 since her appointment to the Marriage and Parenthood portfolio in July 2020 \u2014 that consistently placed the comfort of employers and the architecture of the traditional family above the lived reality of the very people Singapore desperately needs to have children.<\/p>\n Read the record carefully. It does not lie.<\/p>\n Singapore’s own Marriage and Parenthood Survey<\/a> \u2014 data that sits within her own ministry’s purview \u2014 has been screaming the same message since 2016. Financial cost. Work-family conflict. Career anxiety. These are not new revelations.<\/p>\n By 2021, 89% of single respondents who didn’t want children cited the cost of raising them as a key factor. Eight in ten cited lack of time and energy. Nearly eight in ten cited uncertainty about future income.<\/p>\n The government had the diagnosis. Indranee’s response was, repeatedly, to point to flexible work arrangements and encourage employers to “step up.” Not mandate. Encourage.<\/p>\n When MP after MP from both sides of the aisle \u2014 Louis Ng, Jamus Lim, Valerie Lee \u2014 raised the question of enhanced childcare leave, the answer was almost ritualistically the same: we must be careful not to burden employers. We must balance business needs. FWAs are more sustainable.<\/p>\n The data said families were drowning. The minister handed them a pamphlet on swimming.<\/p>\n (Results from National population and talent division’s Marriage and Parenthood Survey 2021<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n There is a more precise way to measure whether a minister truly has the interests of families \u2014 and the TFR \u2014 at heart. Watch how she treats the families that don’t fit the preferred template.<\/p>\n Approximately 745 non-marital live births were recorded annually to Singapore Citizen mothers between 2020 and 2024.<\/p>\n These are real babies, real Singaporean children, born to women who chose to have them. Yet Indranee has consistently defended their exclusion from the Baby Bonus Cash Gift and the Working Mother’s Child Relief.<\/p>\n Her justification? These benefits are designed to “encourage parenthood within the context of marriage.” They are, in her framing, not a cost issue but a “fundamental policy position.”<\/p>\n Think about what that means in practice. Singapore is facing an existential fertility crisis. Every Singaporean birth matters.<\/p>\n And yet the Minister responsible for reversing the decline has looked at 745 births a year \u2014 births that are already happening, by women who have made the very choice the government claims to want \u2014 and decided they do not merit the same support because they arrived outside of wedlock.<\/p>\n This is not the posture of someone whose primary objective is raising the TFR. It is the posture of someone using the TFR framework to enforce a social value system.<\/p>\n When Workers’ Party MP Kenneth Tiong pressed the Ministry in February 2026<\/a> to cost out what it would take to extend these benefits to unwed mothers and compare that against downstream expenditure on ComCare and KidSTART \u2014 a reasonable question \u2014 the Ministry declined to provide the figures.<\/p>\n The answer was, in essence: we don’t track that, and the cost is not the point.<\/p>\n In my view, that answer is disqualifying.<\/p>\n Because “we don’t track that” was not a one-off admission. It was a pattern. When asked whether there was a correlation between socioeconomic status and parental leave take-up, the answer was: we have not studied that.<\/p>\n When asked how many leave days parents consume due to childcare centre closures and sick children \u2014 and whether that routinely exceeds their entitlement \u2014 the answer was: we don’t track the reasons. When asked whether any study had been done on the impact of the SG50 and SG60 Baby Gifts on parenthood decisions, the answer was: not that I am aware of.<\/p>\n A minister who does not track whether poorer parents are being left behind by the leave system. Who does not know if families are routinely running out of childcare leave. Who cannot cost the exclusion of 745 Singaporean births a year from financial support. This is not a resourcing problem. It is a priorities problem.<\/p>\n She did not have the data. More troublingly, she had not sought it. And when asked directly, the Ministry’s position was not that the data was unavailable \u2014 it was that it was beside the point.<\/p>\n It is not beside the point. For a minister responsible for an existential demographic crisis, the data is always the point. The moment a minister stops asking those questions is the moment she has stopped looking for answers \u2014 and started defending a position instead.<\/p>\n One could extend some grace if these gaps were exposed in her first or second year. But Kenneth Tiong’s question came in February 2026 \u2014 over five years after her appointment, over five years into a TFR that fell without interruption on her watch.<\/p>\n After six years, the absence of data is no longer an oversight. It is a choice. And choices reveal priorities.<\/p>\n Low’s broader critique is sharp and correct: the conservative old men who preceded Indranee failed for forty years, and their failure stemmed from a worldview, not from personal experience. He is absolutely right that having children does not automatically produce progressive policy instincts.<\/p>\n But here is where he misses the point. The reason Indranee’s single status is being raised \u2014 whatever the motivations of those raising it \u2014 is that it rhymes with a documented pattern in her decision-making.<\/p>\n A minister who has not navigated the school registration marathon, who has not felt the cold sweat of an unexpected medical bill while on maternity leave, who has not lain awake calculating whether a third child is financially survivable \u2014 such a minister might still govern this portfolio brilliantly, if she had demonstrated an unusual capacity for empathy and structural imagination.<\/p>\n Instead, she has demonstrated the opposite. She has told parents they need a “mindset reset.<\/a>“<\/p>\n She has told a generation drowning in housing costs and childcare fees that they are looking at parenthood through the wrong lens \u2014 too focused on what they lose, not sufficiently focused on the “precious and priceless” gains.<\/p>\n That is not policy leadership. That is a motivational poster.<\/p>\n To be plain: a single, childless minister who fought ferociously for unwed mothers, who pushed to mandate rather than merely encourage family-friendly workplaces, who acknowledged the marriage-centric benefit structure as a structural problem and moved to dismantle it \u2014 that minister would deserve to lead this workgroup. Her personal choices would be irrelevant.<\/p>\n But that is not Indranee’s record. Her record is one of prioritising the economy’s comfort over the family’s pain, of defending a benefits architecture that punishes non-traditional families, and of responding to the loudest demographic alarm bell in Singapore’s history with a plan to change Singaporeans’ mindsets.<\/p>\n Low is right that the criticism of her personal life is misplaced. But the critics are pointing, however clumsily, at something real.<\/p>\n The problem is not that she has never had a child. The problem is that she has spent over five years governing as though the families who need support are the problem \u2014 rather than the system that keeps failing them.<\/p>\n That\u00a0distinction matters. The appointment is made and it will not be reversed. But Singaporeans deserve to understand what it means: the same minister who could not tell Parliament how many births her policies were excluding, who spent five years deferring to employers over families, who met a generational crisis with a mindset campaign \u2014 she now chairs the taskforce charged with fixing it.<\/p>\n Over five years of evidence says she is not the answer. Singapore cannot afford five more.<\/p>\n (For those who prefer their evidence undeniable: a complete record of her parliamentary questions and answers<\/a> since 2020 is appended below. The pattern does not require commentary.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Comments](\"https:\/\/media.theonlinecitizen.com\/Comments_CC_and_Donald_Low_7322ae1765.png\")
<\/p>\nThe data was there. She chose not to hear it.<\/h3>\n
![\"Reason](\"https:\/\/media.theonlinecitizen.com\/Reason_for_not_having_children_37dc4ab2ed.png\")
<\/p>\nThe unwed mother test<\/h3>\n
Back to Donald Low<\/h3>\n
The real objection<\/h3>\n