WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN: THE GROWING - CICRED

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E. GRAHAM
moving average to reveal the temporal trend. The expected increase in
sex ratios at birth up to the early 1980s is confirmed as national rates
rose from around 105 male births per 100 female births in 1966 to
over 108 male births per 100 female births by 1983. Moreover, for
births to Chinese fathers, sex ratios were above the national average for
most of this period, reaching levels of over 109 male births per 100
female births in the early 1980s. It would seem that, for the national
population, son-preference potency intensified towards the end of the
period of rapid fertility decline.
More surprising, perhaps, is the earlier, and apparently more dramatic,
response of the Malay population to reducing family size. In the
late 1960s, their total fertility rate was around 4 children per woman,
higher than that of the Chinese. It then fell precipitously to below
replacement level in the mid-1970s, shadowed by an equally marked
increase in the proportion of male births from a low of 102 per 100
females in 1965 to a high of over 110 per 100 females by 1976. The
small number of annually recorded births to Malay fathers (5,470 in
1976) suggests that ratios may be subject to random fluctuations and
thus a five-year moving average is used to smooth the trend (Figure 3).
It is noteworthy that the increasingly masculine sex ratios at birth
revealed by these official data pre-date the general availability of reliable
technologies for sex identification in early pregnancy, such as have
been implicated in many explanations of later aberrant sex ratios at
birth in Asia (Hull, 1990; Park and Cho, 1995; Gu and Roy, 1995;
Ganatra et al., 2001). As one of the older women in our ethnographic
study commented in relation to the births of her own children in the
early 1970s, “If it’s a boy, then boy. Or girl. There was no such thing as
ultrasound then”.
For the presumed tension between an emerging small family norm
and preferred family sex composition to impact on aggregate sex ratios
at birth, a mechanism is required that allows parents to exercise their
preferences. There was an intensification of male bias in sex ratios at
birth during the period of fertility transition in Singapore. Nevertheless,
before we assume this to be evidence for active discrimination
against daughters, we need to look more closely at the opportunities
for putting motivation into practice and at the alternative, or additional,
possibility of a non-motivational explanation for this increasing
bias in favour of males.