``Pregnancy and childrearing were once considered very personal. Who would have imagined that the authorities would be seeking to intervene?''' she said.
It seems paradoxical to read about countries like Japan and South Korea advocating having more children to deal with the declining birthrate, considering these countries are so crowded already. More creative solutions than making more people---and beyond grudgingly accepting more foreigners into self-proclaimed ethnically homogenous countries---are needed to deal with aging populations and the looming pension crisis, so I hope people more able than I and the Breeding Ministry are at work on it.
3 comments:
more kids = more hagwons = more foreigners for hagwons = more bad, complaining dirty foreigners in clean, perfect korea...
did anyone thing about that? :p
This is interesting to see after browsing through Andrei Lankov's book last night -- one of the chapter's is about the Korean Family Planning Association's "3-3-35" policy from 1966. The policy encouraged women to have 3 kids, spaced 3 years apart, and to stop having kids by the age of 35. At the time it was to lower the birthrate from an average of 6 kids; I wonder if we'll see something similar from the Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Family Affairs for the opposite effect.
I know there was a German medal during World War Two given out to mothers of more than three children. Similarly, China enforces the One Child Policy through making parents pay for things like education - which everyone else gets for free. In the inverse of that, I bet if the Korean government provided 'stimulus checks' to pay for hagwon tuition couples would be a lot more willing to have multiple kids.
Paul beat me to it. The Korean government has long been involved in the "personal" areas of pregnancy and childbearing.
Yes, Korea and Japan are very crowded places, but few economies are set up to keep moving forward while the population shrinks. They need to find a way, but in the meantime they either need to encourage more immigration or expand the number of locally born people.
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