SEOUL– Only 4 percent of single South Korean women in their 20s and early 30s view marriage and childbirth as essential, a survey showed Sunday, a development that illustrated the chronic decline in childbirths in Asia’s fourth-largest economy.
Meanwhile, 12.9 percent of single men in the same age bracket agreed that marriage and childbirth were essential for women, according to the survey conducted by the Korean Association for Social Welfare Studies.
The survey was conducted on 281 unmarried people aged between 20 and 34.
The survey showed that 53.2 of female respondents believed marriage and childbirth for women were not important, compared with 25.8 percent of male respondents.
The survey came as South Korea has been dogged by a chronic decline in childbirths as many young people delay or give up on having babies in the face of an economic slowdown and high home prices.
A total of 249,000 babies were born last year, falling 4.4 percent from the previous record low in 2021, according to data from Statistics Korea.
The country’s total fertility rate, the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime, hit a record low of 0.78 in 2022, much lower than the replacement level of 2.1 that would keep South Korea’s population stable at 51.5 million.
Mothers were 33.5 years old on average when giving birth in 2022, up 0.2 from a year earlier. The average age of a mother giving birth to her first child was 33, followed by 34.2 for her second and 35.6 for her third.
Source: Yonhap News Agency