Constance Goh
Constance Goh MBE (1906–1996) was a Chinese-Singaporean family planning activist. In 1949, she founded the Singapore Family Planning Association, which dramatically reduced the national birth rate. Biography Goh was born to a Presbyterian family in Xiamen, China in 1906. Her father worked in a different city and kept concubines; this led Goh's mother to accept a job in Singapore in 1918. Goh moved to Singapore with her mother and returned to Shanghai in 1924 to attend Shanghai Baptist College, although her limited knowledge of classical Chinese kept her from graduating. She took courses in sociology, and as part of the course work she visited prisons, courts, farms and factories. She said that seeing girls as young as eight years old working in factories with poor conditions "distressed me profoundly". Goh returned to Singapore in 1930, where she studied at a teachers' training school and taught for a year before marrying her husband, Goh Kok Kee, a public health doctor, in 1932. After World War II, she opened a government-funded centre that provided meals to children whose parents could not afford to feed them. It was then that she began to think about family planning measures to discourage couples from starting