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Why South Korean women aren't having babies


On a rainy Tuesday afternoon, Yejin is cooking lunch for her friends at her apartment, where she lives alone on the outskirts of Seoul, happily single.

While they eat, one of them pulls up a well-worn meme of a cartoon dinosaur on her phone. "Be careful," the dinosaur says. "Don't let yourself become extinct like us."

The women all laugh.

"It's funny, but it's dark, because we know we could be causing our own extinction," says Yejin, a 30-year-old television producer.

Neither she, nor any of her friends, are planning on having children. They are part of a growing community of women choosing the child-free life.

South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, and it continues to plummet, beating its own staggeringly low record year after year.

Figures released on Wednesday show it fell by another 8% in 2023 to 0.72.

This refers to the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime. For a population to hold steady, that number should be 2.1.

If this trend continues, Korea's population is estimated to halve by the year 2100.


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https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-south-korean-women-arent-231421482.html

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