Updated at p. ET on March 24, This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. Her father, she says, was abusive and moved out when she was 6, and she has lived with her mother and grandmother ever since, a mini-matriarchy that suits her fine. She wears her hair in a bob, and on the day we met, she had on a black-denim button-down and a beige trench coat.
She is 24, studying for civil-servant exams, and likes reading Andrea Dworkin, Carl Sagan, and the occasional romance novel, which she considers pure fantasy. Lee is part of a boycott movement in South Korea—women who are actively choosing single life. They are the extreme edge of a broader trend away from marriage. By one estimate, more than a third of Korean men and a quarter of Korean women who are now in their mid-to-late 30s will never marry. Even more will never have children. In , Korean women had, on average, six children.
In , the average Korean woman could expect to have just 0. In Seoul, the average is 0. If this downward drift continues, it will not be long before one out of every two women in the capital never becomes a parent. In January, China recorded its first population decline since the s, when the country had been racked by famine. Marriage and children are more closely linked in South Korea than nearly anywhere else, with just 2. For nearly 20 years, the Korean government has tried to encourage more marriages and more babies.
In , the government recognized low fertility as a matter of national importance and put forth its Framework Act on Low Birth Rate in an Aging Society, versions of which have been renewed every five years.
The government has tried expanding maternity leave, offering couples bigger and bigger bonuses for having babies, and subsidizing housing in Seoul for newlyweds. The mayor there has proposed easing visa restrictions to import more cheap foreign nannies, while some rural governments fund bachelors seeking foreign brides. It prompted a feminist protest with women holding banners that read my womb is not a national public good and baby vending machine.
