As South Korea’s birth rate hits fresh lows, Seoul city officials have a plan to help — subsidized egg freezing. But experts warn the initiative is unlikely to reverse precipitous demographic decline.
At just 0.7 births per woman late last year, South Korea has one of the lowest birthrates in the world, far below the replacement rate, meaning the population is ageing — and shrinking — rapidly.
The government has poured billions of dollars into trying to encourage more births, with one of the latest efforts involving Seoul city authorities offering to subsidize the cost of a round of egg freezing.
Photo: AFP
Jeong, who is in her 40s, decided to take them up.
“I felt the pressure to have a baby because of my age, which led me to consider getting married quickly,” said Jeong, who asked to be identified only by her surname.
“When I reached my mid-30s, I suggested to the men I dated that we should get married as soon as possible. But it just didn’t work out,” Jeong added. So she turned to a backup plan.
Photo: AFP
While single women can freeze their eggs, in reality the scheme will only assist women who go on to marry, as clinics offering intrauterine insemination (IUI) and in vitro fertilizations (IVF) typically require marriage certificates, making the procedures virtually impossible for singles or same sex couples to access.
Egg freezing theoretically allows women to preserve their fertility, although it is seen as being more likely to succeed if women undergo the procedure before egg quality starts to sharply decline, typically from age 38 onwards.
Having frozen her eggs, Jeong said she no longer felt “as anxious” about being single and missing out on having a baby — and was ready to wait until she found the right person.
“Now that I have my frozen eggs as insurance, I can take my time,” she said
Helping Korean women to freeze their eggs was determined by Seoul city authorities to be “the most practical solution” for “investing in future childbirth possibilities,” the municipal government said.
“As the age of marriage and pregnancy continues to rise, and women’s participation in society becomes more prominent, there is a growing interest among unmarried women who aspire to conceive and give birth in the future,” it added.
BEYOND FERTILITY
The technology to freeze eggs has been available in South Korea since the late 1990s, but there was little awareness and minimal demand for the procedure.
Cha Kwang-yul, who runs the CHA Medical Group, developed one of the world’s first vitrified egg-freeze preservation methods in 1998, and has run an egg bank since 1999.
But only women with cancer, who might lose fertility through medical treatments, were interested in the procedure, he said.
“It’s only been a few years since the culture... changed and people (started) saying: ‘Hey, if you don’t (plan on getting) married, store your eggs well.’”
Cha’s research has focused on the potential of eggs for stem cell technology, which he said could offer help for many medical concerns such as organ transplants — not just fertility issues.
But in recent years, as more information on the procedure’s potential to help extend female fertility has moved into the mainstream, he has seen growing demand for the procedure.
The number of egg freezing procedures carried out at the CHA Medical Center has risen exponentially in just a few years, from 72 in 2015 to more than 1,000 in 2022.
‘N-PO’ GENERATION
But efforts to fix South Korea’s demographic crisis that focus on encouraging people to get married and have babies are not recognizing major social shifts, experts say.
Young South Koreans have embraced the term “N-po” generation to refer to the decision to abandon aspirations for marriage, parenthood and home ownership due to stagnant economic growth and intense competition for scarce jobs.
Just 3.7 per 1,000 people got married in 2022, according to official data, a record low.
Single-person households now account for 41 percent of all households in South Korea, official figures show — with that figure set to grow in coming decades.
Despite this reality, single parenthood remains highly stigmatized, and rates are far lower than in other industrialized countries, said Hyeyoung Woo, a sociology professor who researches families in South Korea at Portland State University.
Just 2.5 percent of all South Korean babies in 2020 were born out of wedlock, compared to the OECD average of around 40 percent.
Subsidizing egg freezing will not “effectively address the current low birth rate in Korea”, Woo said.
It would be more effective to focus on encouraging marriage and more second children within marriages through housing, tax, childcare and parental leave benefits, she said.
Moreover, the country needs to “be more accepting of diverse forms of family,” she added, including helping single people and same sex couples if they want to have children.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that the budget cuts voted for by the China-aligned parties in the legislature, are intended to force the DPP to hike electricity rates. The public would then blame it for the rate hike. It’s fairly clear that the first part of that is correct. Slashing the budget of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is a move intended to cause discontent with the DPP when electricity rates go up. Taipower’s debt, NT$422.9 billion (US$12.78 billion), is one of the numerous permanent crises created by the nation’s construction-industrial state and the developmentalist mentality it
Experts say that the devastating earthquake in Myanmar on Friday was likely the strongest to hit the country in decades, with disaster modeling suggesting thousands could be dead. Automatic assessments from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said the shallow 7.7-magnitude quake northwest of the central Myanmar city of Sagaing triggered a red alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” it said, locating the epicentre near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, home to more than a million people. Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Saturday morning that the number killed had
RSS