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.
Earlier this month Economic Affairs Minister Kuo Jyh-huei (郭智輝) proposed buying green power from the Philippines and shipping it to Taiwan, in remarks made during a legislative hearing. Because this is an eminently reasonable and useful proposal, it was immediately criticized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). KMT Legislator Chang Chia-chun (張嘉郡) said that Taiwan pays NT$40 billion annually to fix cables, while TPP heavyweight Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) complained that Kuo wanted to draw public attention away from Taiwan’s renewable energy ratio. Considering the legal troubles currently inundating the TPP, one would think Huang would
President William Lai’s (賴清德) National Day address was the source of far more activity and response than the speech itself warranted. The reactions to the speech and subsequent events by the local press, the international press and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) mouthpieces were all very different. Michael Turton’s excellent piece, “Lai lays out the future” in the Oct. 14 edition of this paper, provided some much-needed context and a critical examination of some crucial domestic issues Lai failed to address, adding the glorious comment: “the world parses Lai’s speech like Roman priests inspecting the guts of a sacrificial animal
Last week two magnificent exhibitions opened in London. Both have as their theme the idea of the Silk Road, an-overland trade route said to stretch ever since antiquity all the way across Asia from China to Turkey and hence to Mediterranean Europe. The show at the British Library is entitled A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang and focuses on the extraordinary haul of ancient documents found in the Mogao Buddhist cave temples by a Chinese Daoist priest and sold by him to the explorer and archaeologist Aurel Stein in 1907. Its treasures include the celebrated ninth-century Diamond Sutra, the earliest
Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) last week told residents to avoid wearing scary Halloween costumes on the MRT so as not to alarm other passengers. Well, I thought, so much for my plan to visit Taipei dressed as the National Development Council’s (NDC) biennial population report “Population Projections for the Republic of China (Taiwan): 2024-2070,” which came out last week. Terms like “low birth rate” and “demographic decline” do not cut it — the report is nothing short of a demographic disaster. Yet, in Taiwan, as in other countries, it is solvable. It simply requires a change in mindset. As it
RSS