An employee demonstrates the work process before freezing eggs in a fertility research lab at Cha Fertility Centre in Bundang, South Korea, on April 30 2022. Picture: REUTERS/HEO RAN
Lim was one of about 1,200 unmarried single women who underwent the procedure last year at CHA Medical Center — a number that has doubled over two years. CHA is South Korea’s largest fertility clinic chain with about 30% of the IVF market. The fertility rate — the average number of children born to a woman over her reproductive life — in South Korea was just 0.81 last year. That compares with an average rate of 1.59 for OECD countries in 2020.
“We hear from married couples and watch reality TV shows about how expensive it is to raise kids in terms of education costs and everything, and all these worries translate to fewer marriages and babies,” said Lim. “If I get married now and give birth, I can’t give my baby the kind of environment I had when I grew up...I want better housing, a better neighbourhood and better food to eat,” she said.
That needs to change, argues Jung Jae-hoon, a social welfare studies professor at Seoul Women’s University, noting marriages in South Korea dropped to a record low of 192,500 last year. That’s down about 40% from a decade earlier. Even when looking at marriage levels in 2019 to discount the effect of the pandemic, the decline is still a huge 27%.
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