Managed Multiplicity: The Political Versatility of Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Singapore’s National Imaginary

Abstract

This article presents a discourse analysis of reproductive policy in Singapore, a small Southeast Asian country with ultra-low fertility rates. Focusing on assisted reproduction between the 1980s and 2024, it shows how egg freezing and in vitro fertilization emerged as “politically versatile technologies” that are simultaneously associated with women’s reproductive choice and patriarchal pronatalism. It theorizes that such versatility arises through shifting and stratified policy provisions, the interplay of different policy domains, and discursive processes conditioned by the political regime. Enmeshed with foreign policy goals, social policies and regulatory approaches to assisted reproduction are justified via an increasingly global interpretation of competing gender ideologies. Furthermore, media policy supports the naturalization of heteronormative and patriarchal “family values,” as state-regulated media deploy emotional frames while spotlighting the connections between assisted reproductive technologies, egalitarianism, and pronatalist social policies that selectively benefit heterosexual or married women. By demonstrating how the ideological versatility of assisted reproductive technologies is discursively maintained by state-regulated media and government actors amid policy change, this article advances the concept of “managed multiplicity” to characterize the patriarchal state’s organization of gendered meanings across policy tools, domains, actors, and broader projects concerning national and international legitimacy.