Adoptions in Singapore fall by half over last decade: gov't figures

SINGAPORE, Aug. 22 (Xinhua) -- The number of adoptions in Singapore has fallen by half over the past ten years, local daily Straits Times reported on Monday.

Statistics showed the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports have processed 325 adoption applications last year, down from 556 in 2005 and 703 in 2001, respectively, the newspaper said.

Adoption agencies and voluntary welfare organizations cited various reasons for the fall, including stringent checks, tightening of rules on the supply side and more people going for assisted reproduction.

Fewer people are looking to adopt children as they tried to have children through methods such as in-vitro fertilization, said Yap Mui, senior research fellow at the Institute of Policy studies.

More people are resorting to assisted reproduction because the procedures are now more affordable, with the government co-funding treatment costs.

Better birth control practices also meant that there are now less unwanted babies in the first place, said Paulin Straughan, associate professor at the department of sociology, the National University of Singapore.

It is also because bringing up a child nowadays requires heavy investment in time, energy and money.

The sharp drop comes despite more than 91 percent of the public viewing adoption as a perfectly viable way of starting a family, a study funded by the National University of Singapore found last year.

Experts say that the seemingly drastic fall in the number of adoption cases is not a cause for concern and that the solution lies not in worrying about the adoption rate, but in getting Singaporeans to marry and start a family earlier.

"We must also stop paying lip service to achieving work-life balance," said Straughan.