How family planning and sex education has evolved
Family planning has evolved with the changing needs of the city thanks to the efforts of a dedicated group of women, writes Elaine Yau
When Peggy Lam Pei Yu-dja joined the Family Planning Association as its first full-time executive director in 1961, large broods were the norm, especially in poorer households. Many were refugees from the mainland who crowded into hilltop squatter settlements.
"A family of eight would sleep on the same bed," Lam says. "People coming from the mainland before 1949 were rich investors. But those who came in the 1950s and '60s were destitute. Having children was their only form of entertainment. A big family was viewed by traditional Chinese as being propitious.
"The Tanka [boat dwellers], who made up a large chunk of the population, regarded having another baby as nothing more than adding a pair of chopsticks [to the dinner table]. They saw children as free labour who could help them catch fish."
There was no concept of family planning then and the result was a population explosion that put a severe burden on society, Lam says. By the time she left the association in 1988, not only was birth control widely practised, once-discomfiting notions like pre-marriage check-ups had become routine.
Demographic forces have since swung to the other extreme, with Hong Kong now recording the world's lowest birth rate of 0.94 (Singapore's is 1.3). And as the post-80s and post-90s generations begin to start families now, the association has evolved from being a promoter of birth control to become a promoter of sexual health, sex education - and provider of fertility services.
The association really began in 1936, when a visit by American birth control activist Margaret Sanger, inspired local philanthropist Ellen Li Tso Sau-kwan and obstetrician and gynaecologist William Charles Wallace to set up the Hong Kong Eugenics League. (While eugenics evokes images of controversial social engineering, successors did not know why the name was chosen and the leagues' files were destroyed during the Japanese invasion.)
The league was renamed the Family Planning Association in 1950, and Lam took up the reins about a decade later at Li's invitation. The only full-time staffer aside from doctors and nurses manning its clinic, she had her work cut out for her.