Birth Rates Drop Has Governments in East Asia Scrambling for a Fix

East Asia’s fertility crisis is about to get a whole lot worse. Just ask women like Jiho Kim.

The 26-year-old, who lives in Seoul, is exactly the kind of person South Korea’s government is trying to persuade to have kids: young, employed and open to becoming a parent. But she says having a child feels untenable in Seoul, where home prices have more than doubled in the past two decades and a hypercompetitive work culture tends to penalize women. Cash vouchers and tax credits for parents, plus government subsidies for child care, don’t go very far in a place where families regularly shell out about 10% of their income on private education alone.

None of these incentives, which South Korea began rolling out in earnest about a decade ago, have helped reverse a plunge in the nation’s fertility rate, the lowest in the world. They certainly haven’t persuaded Kim, who’s juggling an acting career and making minimum wage as a part-time cafe worker. Her peers are equally unmoved: Two-thirds of working Korean women say they aren’t even planning to have kids.

“We don’t think: ‘In this era of low birth rates, I should try a little harder to be part of the solution,’” says Kim, speaking for her generation of women. “It’s difficult enough to make ends meet right now.”

Kim’s hesitations echo across East Asia, a region that dominates the list of nations with the lowest fertility rates. Every industrialized country on the planet is contending with the same looming reality: far more deaths than births. Before the end of the century, the United Nations says the global population could shrink for the first time since the bubonic plague wiped out as much as half of Europe in the 1300s.

The decline in fertility—or the number of children born per woman—coupled with longer lifespans has profound consequences for the health of economies and government finances. Japan is facing acute labor shortages. Many European nations are already struggling to keep up with the cost of providing pensions to swelling ranks of retirees. And globally, the growth in the number of seniors has outpaced the availability of care, with a shortage of 10 million health-care workers expected by 2030, according to the World Health Organization.

Time is running out. Kim’s cohort of East Asian women age 25 to 34—when they’re statistically most likely to have their first child—is rapidly shrinking. That’s partly related to earlier government efforts to encourage or even legislate smaller families. Next year, the size of this demographic in the region is set to fall below 100 million for the first time since the 1980s, according to UN data, bucking a global trend that sees the segment still growing.

That means a shrinking pool of women for governments to reach. By 2100 the populations of South Korea, Japan and China—representing a fifth of humanity—are expected to halve. Reversing course is especially tricky in East Asia, a socially conservative, relatively racially homogenous region where alternatives such as opening the door to more immigrants aren’t popular. South Korea’s government declared the situation a “national emergency” this year, and officials in Japan said they had only a few years left to address their own “crisis.”

Against that backdrop, officials have increasingly prioritized boosting births. It’s a big change from recent years, when many East Asian nations aimed to curb fertility, most famously in China, which instituted a one-child policy in the late 1970s. Today governments are trying to push cultural attitudes in the other direction: In parts of China, government officials are calling women to ask about their plans to have kids and putting up signs and posters with messages such as “three kids is best!” South Korea and Japan have pledged more generous leave for new parents. There have also been some baffling moves, including in South Korea, where a lawmaker promoted Kegel exercises, which are meant to strengthen a woman’s pelvic floor. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, the government plans to introduce a dating app, with the goal of nudging up marriage rates.

Many women refuse to budge. Kazane Kajiya, 28, who lives in Tokyo, says her views on motherhood were shaped at an early age, when she observed how many sacrifices her own mother made to keep their home running smoothly. In Japanese society, women often shoulder the majority of domestic duties, including doing seven times more housework than their husbands—far above the global average and equaling about 111 trillion yen ($725 billion) in unpaid labor, according to a government report. Fewer than half of Japan’s women return to their careers after having children.

Kajiya, who works for a company that assists foreign residents, is so opposed to having kids that she traveled in 2023 to the US to get sterilized. To qualify for the procedure in Japan, women must already have children and obtain the consent of a husband. Kajiya is suing the government so others don’t have to jump through the hurdles she did.

“The Japanese government is obsessed with our uteruses,” she says. “Even if I say, ‘I don’t want to have a child,’ they want me to wait.”

The pressing question now is whether government interventions will succeed in boosting fertility rates and, if not, whether societies can adapt in other ways to mitigate the effect of a rapidly aging population. Critics argue that current approaches are still too focused on upholding the traditional ideal of a young, nuclear family—rather than adapting to today’s reality of more educated, career-oriented women who want to have kids later in life, if at all. Across East Asia, about 1 in 5 babies are now born to women over the age of 35, compared with 4% just two decades ago.

Most women who have kids in the region are married—intense discrimination and high costs mean fewer than 10% of births occur outside of wedlock, with Japan the lowest, at about 2%. That compares to a 41% average among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries.

To get anywhere, many women say, East Asian countries must address deeper-rooted cultural norms that place an unequal burden on mothers, whether in the workplace or in their personal lives. In South Korea, for instance, the gender pay gap is among the widest in the world. And until recently in parts of China, parents couldn’t register a child born out of wedlock without paying a fine.

“The best way to stimulate fertility is to make women feel more secure,” says Jia Yu, associate professor at the Center for Social Research at Peking University in Beijing. “The cost of children is one thing. But the women who give birth, they worry about work-life balance and their jobs.”

Demographers have for years flagged that the best way to boost birth rates is to make women feel socially equal. In fact, it’s the top recommendation from the OECD, which advised officials in a recent report to “promote a fairer sharing of work and childbearing,” alongside making housing more affordable.

“Living in a society with very traditional norms—this has huge implications for fertility,” says Tomas Sobotka, who researches low fertility as deputy director of the Vienna Institute of Demography.

Sobotka cites a few potential avenues for governments to consider, such as reforming labor rules to reduce working hours and outlawing gender-based discrimination. He also suggested expanding access to parental leave and other benefits.

Without these kinds of changes, women are likely to continue “withdrawing” from marriage and childbirth, he says.

“Considering the trends we have seen among young women, the future indeed looks quite uncertain and somewhat worrying,” he says.

Yeonhwa Gong, 32, is among those who have withdrawn in South Korea. In her early 20s, she had a steady boyfriend and was open to marriage and having kids. Then she came across social media posts about a growing movement in her country called “4B” that espouses four rules, all starting with the letter “B” in Korean: no dating, no marriage, no sex, no kids.

Gong wanted to learn more. South Korea has long struggled with weak prosecution for gender-based violence and sex crimes. Predators placing spy cams in public bathrooms to sell the content online is so common that it has its own name: molka. The country of about 50 million people is one of only two developed economies without an anti-discrimination law. Frustrated by this state of affairs, Gong and thousands of other women connected online to vent and organize protests. There is no reliable data on the size of the 4B movement, which has now become global, but scholars who’ve studied it estimate it encompasses at least 30,000 women in South Korea.

“Women should have some power over birth,” Gong says. “They need to decide on their own.” As she sees it, if the government—which so desperately wants more babies—won’t protect women, her generation will simply cut off men entirely.

Eventually, Gong enrolled in a women’s studies program and broke up with her boyfriend. She also acquired a following on YouTube with videos decrying what she sees as South Korea’s patriarchal values. The blowback was intense: Some viewers posted death threats and encouraged her to kill herself. The experience shook her. This year she moved to Australia, where she’s studying to become a nurse, a career choice she hopes will allow her to remain abroad.

Gong doesn’t think South Korea has what it takes to persuade more progressive-minded women to have children. Most of the government’s policies, she says, don’t actually consider what women want. Rather than throwing money at couples already planning to have kids, she thinks enacting anti-discrimination laws would be a better way to sway women who are on the fence.

Unless things change, Gong says, “the pro-natalist policies in South Korea will fail.”

China’s pro-natalist push is more recent than South Korea’s, with the one-child policy officially ending in 2016. When the hoped-for long-term baby bump failed to materialize, authorities began a public campaign to encourage families to have three children. Inducements have included subsidies and cash allowances from cities and provinces, and at the national level, making marriage easier and divorce harder.

But the forces of tradition have clashed with the expectations of a younger generation, spurring conversation about less conventional routes to motherhood.

Xu Zaozao, 36, was among those who got swept up in the debate and learned that China’s efforts to push up birth rates only go so far. While living in Beijing six years ago, Xu considered having a child, but her career was just taking off. So she decided she would freeze her eggs, delaying the decision.

Medical staff at the hospital she visited refused to help her, saying a marriage certificate was required. “The doctor wanted me to leave as soon as possible,” she recalls.

In China, as in much of East Asia, medically assisted fertility treatments are reserved for married couples. Many regions of the world’s second-largest economy also used to impose a large one-time “social maintenance fee” on those who have a child out of wedlock. Until last year, unmarried women in Sichuan province couldn’t register the birth of a child. Easing of those policies was part of the government’s push to boost birth rates after the country’s population shrank in 2022 for the first time in 60 years.

“If the state really wants children, then you’ve got to figure out how to encourage and support all people who choose to have children: non-heterosexual couples, single mothering, IVF,” says Katharine Moon, a political science professor and the Wasserman Chair of Asian Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

Demographers aren’t confident about what comes next. Although some argue that fewer babies is ultimately good for an increasingly hot and crowded planet, the strain of having too many old people is hard to ignore. Artificial intelligence could reduce the need for labor, but then there’s the issue of innovation: Young people bring energy and creativity to their workplaces, lifting economies through their productivity.

Xu says conservative policymakers in China must begin by letting go of the past to prepare for the future. After being denied egg freezing treatment in Beijing, she sued the government in a historic case that gained widespread media attention.

Xu lost the lawsuit this year. But she says her case helped spark a debate about alternative solutions to the fertility crisis that China’s leadership refuses to consider.

“My need for egg freezing is more about preserving a possibility,” she says. “Maybe I could enter marriage in the future and then have a baby. Or I could have a child by myself. Or I could just give up completely. It’s about autonomy over my body.”