Women in South Korea Are on Strike Against Being ‘Baby-Making Machines’

NYT OPINION: Women in South Korea Are on Strike Against Being ‘Baby-Making Machines’
By Hawon Jung
Section: Opinion
Source: New York Times
Published Date: January 27, 2023 at 02:00AM

Women are fed up with this traditionalist society’s impossible expectations of mothers.

After trying for over a year to persuade more South Korean women to have babies, Chung Hyun-back says one reason stands out for her failure: “Our patriarchal culture.” Ms. Chung, who was tasked by the previous government with reversing the country’s plummeting birthrate, knows firsthand how tough it is to be a woman in South Korea. She chose her career over nuptials and children. Like her, millions of young women have been collectively spurning motherhood in a so-called birth strike.
A 2022 survey found that more women than men — 65 percent versus 48 percent — don’t want children. They’re doubling down by avoiding matrimony (and its conventional pressures) altogether. The other term in South Korea for birth strike is “marriage strike.”
The trend is killing South Korea. For three years in a row, the country has recorded the lowest fertility rate in the world, with women of reproductive age having fewer than one child on average. It reached the “dead cross,” when deaths outnumbered births, in 2020, nearly a decade earlier than expected.

Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/27/opinion/south-korea-fertility-rate-feminism.html