“It’s to encourage young couples to have kids”.
That’s the rationale behind many of Singapore’s family policies—government-initiated paternity leave, expanded maternity benefits, and the Medisave Maternity Package. These initiatives are more than one-off monetary incentives, they are a public affirmation that both mothers and fathers play unique and irreplaceable roles in a child’s life.
The state says mums and dads matter. But another message is gaining traction: that they don’t. That a child doesn’t really need a father. Or a mother. Just “parents.” How long can we say one thing in policy, but ignore the opposite in practice?
One of the loudest voices pushing for a redefinition of family in Singapore is Prout—an LGBTQ+ platform that calls for more “inclusive” ways to start a family. Among its key messages is that queer couples should be encouraged to raise children too.
Sounds progressive, until you look closer. These setups don’t just expand family models. They start with the deliberate absence of either a mum or a dad. That’s not inclusion. That’s deprivation of children’s fundamental rights, right from the start.
What gets lost in all this is the one relationship where real gender equality plays out: a man and a woman, raising a child together, bringing the best of both to the table. Strip that away, and the child pays the price.
What is Prout?
A quick scan of Prout’s events and content shows that it frames itself as a “safer” meetup and support platform for the LGBTQ+ community in Singapore. Beyond support groups and parenting talks, it also runs an app that connects users to “LGBTQ-friendly” service providers for healthcare, housing, employment and more.
The goal is to help queer individuals navigate Singapore’s legal and social limits around family formation.
Under the banner of safety and inclusion, Prout positions itself as a platform for LGBTQ+ support. In doing so, it has featured resources and events that highlight non-traditional family forms, including those where parental roles are not defined by biological sex.
However, what emerges is a system that celebrates adult choice while offloading the cost onto children, who are expected to adjust to being intentionally deprived of a maternal or paternal presence.
Prout is not alone
Looking further into Singapore’s landscape of LGBTQIA+ allies, this ecosystem extends beyond apps and social platforms. LGBTQ-oriented networks have produced resources that actively guide individuals in navigating legal constraints around family formation.
One notable example is a legal guidebook titled “Same But Different”. As its name suggests, it aims to normalise non-traditional family units while acknowledging the legal hurdles involved. The guide offers advice to same-sex couples on starting families, proposing strategies such as single-parent adoption, shared custody, or informal guardianship.
These strategies provide pathways for forming families that fall outside the traditional legal framework—approaches which, in many cases, begin without the involvement of either a mother or a father in the conventional sense.
But Aren’t Gender Roles Just Stereotypes?
Danger?
Aren’t we already living in the 21st century where men and women are equal, interchangeable even, in their ability to parent? Where clinging to ‘mother’ and ‘father’ roles simply reinforces outdated, heteronormative norms? That’s the popular retort that conveniently equates gender complementarity to the endorsement of gender stereotyping.
Gender complementarity does not seek to force women into kitchens or men into the workforce. It seeks to recognise that biological sex, relational embodiment, and psychological differences matter in the development of a child.
Science affirms what intuition has long suggested: fathers and mothers, though equally capable of love, relate to children in profoundly different and irreplaceable ways. When we examine the neurological and emotional development of a child, the distinctions become clear.
- Mothers, with higher levels of oxytocin and estrogen, are biologically primed for nurturing, emotional bonding, and early caregiving, especially in the formative years.
- Fathers, shaped by testosterone and vasopressin, often foster risk-taking, independence, and boundary-setting, engaging children in a kind of play and discipline that promotes resilience and self-regulation.
To erase the input of either parent is to flatten the richness of parenthood, and reduces parenting to a generic function—one who simply feeds, cleans, and entertains, rather than honouring its embodied particularity.
The Impact of a Missing Parent
What is its embodied particularity then?
It is seen in how children benefit from the unique maternal or paternal influence as mentioned above. Take away a father, and a child loses a role model of how a man cares and provides for them and relates to others. This is important if the child is a boy learning to be a man, or a girl learning how she ought to be treated by men.
Take away a mother, and a child misses the early bonding, the irreplaceable comfort of a mother’s touch. The child also misses out on the life-sustaining intimacy of breastfeeding, a gift that not only nourishes the baby nutritionally but nourishes the bond between the mother and child.
Take this trajectory 10-15 years later, and one possible outcome could look like the negative influence that besets children who grow up in fatherless households: narratives of abandonment and unresolved struggles with identity that lead into increased delinquent behaviour.
When Ideals Are Broken, Should We Abandon Them?
Of course, in Singapore, the predictable rebuttal arises: “Why should the government mandate that children have an exclusive right to a father and mother, especially when so many Singaporean men abandon their families?”
This is false on two counts.
First, there is no epidemic of paternal abandonment in Singapore. Each year, fewer than one percent of all births are registered without a father’s name on the birth certificate. That’s a clear sign that fatherlessness isn’t a widespread problem here.
In fact, fatherhood is both recognised and reinforced at the national level. A 2009 survey found that 97% of Singaporeans agreed fathers play a vital role in a child’s life, and 84% believed that fathers are actively involved in their children’s upbringing. Since then, public awareness and government support for active fathering have only grown stronger.
Second, the argument that “some fathers leave, so children don’t really need fathers” collapses under scrutiny. It trades on a false dichotomy: either fathers are always present, or they’re not needed at all. That’s like saying we shouldn’t value marriage because some marriages fail.
Yes, some fathers abandon their families. Some are abusive. That’s tragic. But the failure of the ideal does not make the ideal itself dispensable. If anything, it shows why we need to protect and promote it.
Here’s the real contradiction: we’re told that a child doesn’t need a father (or a mother), while entire government campaigns exist to encourage father-child bonding. If parenting roles are interchangeable, why invest in fatherhood at all?
Rather than discard the norm because it’s sometimes broken, we should ask a harder question: why would we institutionalise a family structure, like same-sex parenting, that deliberately denies a child either their mother or father from the very start?
The Moral Price of Designer Families
That bad ideas like same-sex parenting create victims should already be obvious. But what’s often missed is how deep the damage runs.
It’s not just that children are deprived of one or both biological parents—it’s that motherhood becomes a market, and embryonic children are treated as disposable.
The guidebook Same But Different even ironically admits this:
What registers to the same-sex couple as a financial cost is, in reality, a profound moral and ethical price that society will bear if same-sex parenting is legalised.
With the rise of assisted reproductive technologies like surrogacy, in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), and gamete intrafallopian transfer (GIFT), the true cost is this: treating human life and parenthood as commodities shaped by adult desire.
Once we say that adults have an absolute right to fulfill their desires for a child (regardless of natural limitations or social norms), we slide down a slippery slope.
The Marketisation of Motherhood
American activist Katy Faust puts it succinctly: “No adult has a ‘right’ to a child – children have rights to their parents.” When that order is reversed, a child’s right to their biological heritage is erased, and their very conception becomes a transaction.
In the push for same-sex parenting, the female body is reduced to function. Surrogacy turns women into wombs-for-rent—often out of financial desperation, and frequently in countries with weak legal protections.
It commodifies pregnancy, severs the bond between gestational mother and child, and separates the act of bearing a child from the act of raising one. What should be an intimate, embodied relationship is outsourced, contracted, and finally cut off.
Far from empowerment, surrogacy is reproductive exploitation. Just as prostitution sells the body for male pleasure, surrogacy sells the womb for the fulfilment of adult desires—treating the sacred as a service.
Equally painful is the unseen wound inflicted by anonymous sperm or egg donation. Over time, this wound deepens into a longing for identity and belonging, especially for the parent whose face one sees in the mirror but cannot name.
Most of us can’t relate—because we live with the quiet privilege of knowing our natural parents. But speak to anyone cut off from their biological roots, and the ache is unmistakable. It’s why so many spend years searching for the parents they never knew.
The Singapore that Should Stand
As Minister for Social and Family Development, Masagos Zulkifli said on 28 November 2022:
“The prevailing social norm in our society is still that of a man and woman marrying, and having and bringing up children within a stable family unit. This is also the family structure that the Government encourages.”
Singapore has long upheld the traditional family as the cornerstone of society. Good.
But if we truly believe that, we must protect not just the concept of family, but the children at its heart. That means resisting efforts to normalise structures built on intentional deprivation—where a child’s right to both parents is traded away for the sake of adult desire.
It’s easy to affirm the value of family when the definition of “family” isn’t under threat. But now, with growing pressure to redefine it around the happiness of adults pursuing alternative lifestyles, Singapore must double down, not drift.
The time to protect the ordinary meaning of family is precisely when it becomes contested. Because when that meaning is guarded, children are too.