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.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), and the country’s other political groups dare not offend religious groups, says Chen Lih-ming (陳立民), founder of the Taiwan Anti-Religion Alliance (台灣反宗教者聯盟). “It’s the same in other democracies, of course, but because political struggles in Taiwan are extraordinarily fierce, you’ll see candidates visiting several temples each day ahead of elections. That adds impetus to religion here,” says the retired college lecturer. In Japan’s most recent election, the Liberal Democratic Party lost many votes because of its ties to the Unification Church (“the Moonies”). Chen contrasts the progress made by anti-religion movements in
Taiwan doesn’t have a lot of railways, but its network has plenty of history. The government-owned entity that last year became the Taiwan Railway Corp (TRC) has been operating trains since 1891. During the 1895-1945 period of Japanese rule, the colonial government made huge investments in rail infrastructure. The northern port city of Keelung was connected to Kaohsiung in the south. New lines appeared in Pingtung, Yilan and the Hualien-Taitung region. Railway enthusiasts exploring Taiwan will find plenty to amuse themselves. Taipei will soon gain its second rail-themed museum. Elsewhere there’s a number of endearing branch lines and rolling-stock collections, some
Last week the State Department made several small changes to its Web information on Taiwan. First, it removed a statement saying that the US “does not support Taiwan independence.” The current statement now reads: “We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side. We expect cross-strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means, free from coercion, in a manner acceptable to the people on both sides of the Strait.” In 2022 the administration of Joe Biden also removed that verbiage, but after a month of pressure from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), reinstated it. The American
This was not supposed to be an election year. The local media is billing it as the “2025 great recall era” (2025大罷免時代) or the “2025 great recall wave” (2025大罷免潮), with many now just shortening it to “great recall.” As of this writing the number of campaigns that have submitted the requisite one percent of eligible voters signatures in legislative districts is 51 — 35 targeting Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus lawmakers and 16 targeting Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers. The pan-green side has more as they started earlier. Many recall campaigns are billing themselves as “Winter Bluebirds” after the “Bluebird Action”
RSS