"Will Giving a Few Bucks Make People Have More Children?"

Criticism and Encouragement Flood Government's Low Birthrate Measures... Prioritize Real Estate and Private Education Policies
Even with Government Policy Implementation, '70% of Citizens Unaware' According to Bosayeon Report
"To Increase Birthrate, Marriage Rate Must Rise... Political Sphere's Gender Conflict Aggravation Also a Problem"

A country where the average number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime is 0.78. Recently, Statistics Korea announced this total fertility rate. South Korea is the only OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) member country where the total fertility rate has fallen below one. The average fertility rate among the 38 member countries was 1.59 as of 2020. South Korea ranks last, with Italy in 37th place. Italy's total fertility rate in 2020 was 1.24.

Following the release of the total fertility rate, criticism has intensified in the media and online communities regarding the government’s expenditure of 280 trillion won over the past 15 years on low birthrate countermeasures, with calls for more fundamental measures to be devised.

In this context, the report titled "Monitoring and Tasks of Pregnancy and Childbirth Support Policies," published by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs on March 8, World Women’s Day, is noteworthy. The report highlighted that although the government has been establishing a "Basic Plan for Low Fertility and Aging Society" every five years since 2006 and is currently implementing various policies under the 4th Basic Plan (2021?2025), the majority of adult men and women, the actual policy users, are unaware of these policies. In other words, the government’s policies are "not attracting any attention at all."

Baby and mother. [Photo by Pixabay]

Dr. So-Young Lee’s team, which authored the report, conducted an online survey in June last year targeting 2,000 adults aged 20 to 44 to assess awareness of low birthrate policies among policy users. Specifically, they investigated how well the respondents knew about the "12 pregnancy and childbirth support policies" implemented in 2021 under the 4th Basic Plan. The results showed that 7 out of 10 people were unaware of 11 of these programs.

Regarding the policy that provides medical expense support to pregnant women with high-risk pregnancy conditions (19 types), 79.8% of respondents either did not know about it at all (45.7%) or had heard of it but did not know the details (34.1%). Only 2.7% responded that they were well aware of it.

For the "Early Life Health Management Policy," where nurses visit households with pregnant women or infants to provide health consultations, 85% of respondents either did not know about it or had only heard of it without understanding it, while only 15% said they knew it well or to some extent.

Similarly, awareness of various support programs for mothers and newborns, women with disabilities, adolescent mothers, and marriage immigrants was generally low, with 71.4% to 95.6% of respondents indicating they did not know about these programs.

Dr. Lee’s team pointed out in the report that "awareness is essential to enhance the effectiveness of policies, but the low awareness of pregnancy and childbirth support policies has emerged as a problem," emphasizing that "urgent efforts are needed to raise awareness."

Reflecting this public sentiment, criticism and calls for encouragement regarding the government’s low birthrate policies are overflowing. A user with the ID 'mnl***' wrote on a Naver community, "Even though massive efforts to change the system socially are not enough, seeing support policies that only give a few coins makes me laugh," adding, "The slogans need to change, but a large-scale campaign like before, saying 'Don’t distinguish between sons and daughters, just have one child,' which was drilled into ears, is urgently needed."

User 'anne**' commented, "The reason seems to be that politicians and public officials who make policies do not feel the crisis of population decline," and said, "Who exactly are they encouraging to have children? Working hours have increased, prices have gone up. In this situation, is there time to date and marry? And do people have money? Instead of wasting taxes on ineffective support policies, raise wages for workers and reform real estate and private education policies first."

On the workplace community Blind, a female employee K working at company S argued, "To increase the birthrate, the marriage rate must be raised, but the gender conflicts politically exploited by men and women and the culture of comparison caused by the development of SNS are also problems," adding, "I believe these can be improved through public service advertisements and campaigns. Shouldn’t budgets be spent on these areas?"

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.