This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.
Turning Point: South Korea announced plans to create a ministry to address its low birthrate, which Yoon Suk Yeol, the country’s president, called a “national emergency.”
At a time when birthrates around the world are falling, South Korea stands apart. The country has experienced some of the steepest declines in fertility rates over the past 60 years, and the main reason behind this trend is very clear: There are not enough adult women who are of childbearing age.
Beginning with Park Chung-hee’s regime in the 1960s, decades of anti-natalist policies helped normalize married couples having two or three children, as opposed to six or more in previous generations. And during the 1980s, when the birthrate first fell below the replacement rate, the selective abortion of female fetuses became common because of a preference for sons, further reducing the number of women in the population. However, an imbalanced sex ratio does not fully explain why South Korea’s fertility rate keeps falling so drastically, especially for married couples.
For the past 20 years, the government has treated this phenomenon as a national emergency and has spent billions on “pronatalist” policies. And while there are still families having children, South Korea still sets records for the world’s lowest fertility rate.
President Yoon Suk Yeol has frequently blamed feminism for South Korea’s family planning failures. He does not believe structural gender discrimination exists and has even pledged to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. But such rhetoric completely ignores the fact that female workers on average make one-third less than their male counterparts or that employers prefer to fire pregnant employees rather than providing paid maternity leave. Instead, it reinforces a growing hostility toward women, as evidenced by the notable rise in digital sex crimes and other forms of gender-based violence in recent years.
It is not feminism, but rather harmful gender stereotypes that have led many women to postpone or refuse marriage. This is significant in a hetero-centric country with hardly any nonmarital births. But more “healthy relationships” will not “fix” the birthrate if families are having fewer children overall.
One-dimensional narratives about “gender wars” and fertility rates obscure just how fundamentally broken South Korean society is for all potential parents, especially those who earn lower incomes or who live outside metropolitan areas like Seoul. Most important, they also negate the existence of the women who do want children.
Whenever I see all the news and debates about the “record-low” birthrate in South Korea, I cannot help but think about ordinary people like my friend Lee Ji Young, whose dream is simply to become a working mom.
Lee used to work at Korea Optical High Tech, a manufacturing company in Gumi, South Korea. One month after catching fire in October 2022, the company, despite receiving 130 billion won (about $93 million) in insurance money, texted its employees that it would be closing permanently. Its mother company, Nitto Denko in Japan, then transferred all production to its Pyeongtaek site, and none of the Gumi employees were allowed to relocate. Instead, nearly 200 of those workers agreed to resign “voluntarily” and accepted a severance package; about a dozen refused.
Of the employees who refused to resign, seven continued to protest at the burned factory. Significantly, five of them are women. Two of Lee’s colleagues have been staging a sit-in on the factory’s roof since Jan. 8, 2024, when the company received a demolition permit for the building. Their names are Park Jung Hye and So Hyun Sook, and they are fighting for their rights, their livelihood and their dignity. Lee, who oversees the protest’s daily operations on the ground, told me she “only had good memories” of the time when she first started at the company, which was where she met her husband. After she “voluntarily resigned” in 2019, her husband continued to work there, and both were thrilled when she was asked to return to her old job in April 2022. They even began planning for a family, believing they had finally achieved financial stability.
Lee is now active in the company’s union and barely has time to go home. Her husband found a new job to support them, but their modest dream of starting a family has been postponed indefinitely.
Although her situation might be unique, Lee’s barriers to parenthood are not. She, like many other young South Koreans, understands that children need stability. But to provide that stability long-term, she and other aspiring mothers require the government to use formal policies to resolve systemic instabilities that deny them basic reproductive rights. Korean women have always been resilient, but they alone cannot overcome South Korea’s extreme culture of misogyny and lack of economic redistribution and security. Essentially, our society is unsustainable for working women, let alone working mothers.
South Korean women generally lack basic structural support throughout their entire lives. Having a child could mean sacrificing hard-fought careers and becoming financially dependent on husbands (assuming they are employed). And aside from forcing single-income households to deal with the high costs of child care, this effectively limits women’s career options to homemaking, for which they receive no wages or pensions.
South Korea’s outdated welfare system is also heavily reliant on a traditional family structure, leaving little support for single elderly women who have spent most of their adult lives at home. This can be financially devastating for families without a patriarch. In fact, there have been several cases involving female-only households where elderly mothers and their adult daughters, unable to secure jobs with livable wages, have died by suicide due to a lack of financial support.
Somebody should listen to the outcries of Korean women. So far, we only have one another. In the meantime, I try to visit the Gumi factory as often as I can to say hello to the two women on the roof. I admire them. But at the same time, I yearn for a world where people like Park, So and Lee no longer need to be heroes.
There is a good chance that I, myself, will end up being a poor, single woman in the future. And with South Korean government policies demanding that I become a burden to my children, it is quite fortunate that I don’t have any. At a women’s rights protest I once heard a young woman say, “The deepest form of love I can show to my nonexistent children is not giving birth to them.”
I most strongly agree with her.
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