Mother of the Nation
By JL Copeland
She thought she was giving a little. She gave everything.
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South Korea’s demographic crisis inspired Mother of the Nation.
Does South Korea have a birth rate problem?
You bet. For almost forty years, South Korea has regularly topped the charts for the lowest birthrate in the world.
Due to a number of reasons, including high housing costs, fierce competition in education (Koreans spend the most on private education among OECD countries), and woeful gender discrimination, Koreans are reluctant to have children (or if they do, it’s one and done).
As you can guess from the above graph, there may be trouble ahead.
What problems will the low birth rate in South Korea cause?
Forget schools closing down, the army running out of soldiers to defend the country from North Korea, hospitals overflowing with the elderly, the national pension fund running dry (this was expected to happen in 2055 until a recent tweak to eek it out another decade).
Those are small gam-ja.*
Because the population is expected to decrease by 96% in the next 100 years (with likely extinction around 2700).
Yeah, oh shit.
How did this happen?
Well, aside from the current problems mentioned above, back in the seventies and eighties, the government actively encouraged people to have two kids max. They felt people were having too many.
*Yep, that’s potatoes in Korean.
My wife can recall a class in elementary school where the teacher asked students to put up their hands according to how many siblings they had.
Those who had none were applauded. When the teacher asked, “Who has two siblings?” and my wife raised her hand, much tutting and finger-wagging.
She’d be raised to the roof today, decorated with laurels, toasted with cups of Mr Pocari’s Sweat.
These days, the Korean government literally throw money and benefits at people when they have kids, and the more you have, the higher the pay-off (e.g. day-care is free, it’s possible for third children to receive a full scholarship for university, to name just a couple of perks).
And has this had an effect on the birthrate?
Nope.
For someone like my wife and me, these perks are great. We are a family of modest means and modest living, and with all the support we get, raising kids in Korea has been a delight.
But Korea is a very homogeneous, dare I say conformist, society.
What’s the impact of low birth rates?
Most Koreans are stuck on the treadmill of endless crippling competitiveness or Keeping-up-with-the-Kims.
This means they need to borrow x hundred thousand dollars to buy the required apartment, spend x hundred (or thousand) dollars a month on little Min-soo’s English, Maths and Science academies to make sure he gets that place at the top university ahead of little Soo-jin, next door.
Oh, and if you’re a woman, if you get pregnant, you can forget that promotion (and maybe even your job).
So, unlike our family, most Koreans to the maths and say ‘nope.’ The benefits for that extra child? Chicken feed.
Korean officials are a conservative bunch, so despite spending billions of dollars, they are still reluctant to make the key structural changes that might give them a chance at rerouting more storks this way.*
Mother of the Nation is my vision of a Korean government in the near future taking more radical steps. Perhaps a step too far.
A simple procedure. Safe. Quick. Generously compensated.
A nation is built one mother at a time.
*Koreans tell little kids that babies come from ‘under the bridge.’ Bridge and legs are the same words in Korean. Go figure.
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Just one egg—just one step toward independence.
But behind closed doors, the truth multiplies.
Mother of the Nation is a dark, unsettling look at power, bodies, and what happens when people become resources.
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