Opinion | Women in South Korea Are on Strike Against Being 'Baby-Making Machines' (Published 2023) – The New York Times
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Ms. Jung is the creator of “Flowers of Fire,” a ebook about South Korea’s #MeToo motion.
After making an attempt for over a yr to steer extra South Korean girls to have infants, Chung Hyun-back says one purpose stands out for her failure: “Our patriarchal tradition.” Ms. Chung, who was tasked by the earlier authorities with reversing the nation’s plummeting birthrate, is aware of firsthand how powerful it’s to be a lady in South Korea. She selected her profession over nuptials and youngsters. Like her, tens of millions of younger girls have been collectively spurning motherhood in a so-called beginning strike.
A 2022 survey discovered that extra girls than males — 65 p.c versus 48 p.c — don’t want children. They’re doubling down by avoiding matrimony (and its typical pressures) altogether. The opposite time period in South Korea for beginning strike is “marriage strike.”
The development is killing South Korea. For 3 years in a row, the nation has recorded the lowest fertility rate on the earth, with girls of reproductive age having fewer than one baby on common. It reached the “dead cross,” when deaths outnumbered births, in 2020, almost a decade earlier than expected.
Now, about half of the nation’s 228 cities, counties and districts danger dropping so many residents they might vanish. Day care facilities and kindergartens are being transformed into nursing homes. Ob-Gyn clinics are closing, and funeral parlors are opening. At Seoksan Elementary College, in rural Gunwi County, the scholar physique has shrunk from 700 pupils to 4. When last I visited, the kids couldn’t even kind a soccer staff.
Younger Koreans have well-documented reasons to not begin a household, together with the staggering costs of elevating kids, unaffordable properties, awful job prospects and soul-crushing work hours. However girls particularly are fed up with this traditionalist society’s not possible expectations of moms. So that they’re quitting.
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