Published Oct 12, 2016, 5:00 am SGT
Janice Tai
You do not need much space to have sex.
That was the feisty rejoinder from Senior Minister of State Josephine Teo, who oversees the National Population and Talent Division, to a question on whether young people are not getting their flats early enough to have children.
The suggestion was that this could be a chicken-and-egg problem. To qualify for the Parenthood Priority Scheme, which gives first- time married couples first dibs on getting a flat, they must be expecting or have a citizen child below 16.
But to have a child, some say they need to have a flat first.
With a straight face, Mrs Teo declared: "You need a very small space to have sex."
Known for her candid blog posts on dating and marriage, Mrs Teo does not mince her words - think "menstruation" and "cysts" - when it comes to urging young people to look for love and settle down early.
In an interview on marriage and parenthood issues last week, the mother of three teenage children tackled issues ranging from infertility to why the Government should not be "too kaypoh" (Hokkien for busybody).
She noted that the Singaporean love story has a different arc from that of countries in the West. "In our case, man meets woman, man falls in love with woman, man proposes to woman, they then plan the wedding and do the house," she said.
"In France, in the UK, in the Nordic countries, man meets woman, tonight they can make a baby already. They love each other. Both of them partly have their own family, so it is a matter of living in yours or living in mine, and they also don't have to worry about marriage - that comes later," she added
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