Are Declining Birth Rates A Sign Of Feminist Protest Around The World?

Updated Jan. 13, 2024 at 12:05 p.m.

WARSAW — Declining birth rates are a major societal problem for multiple countries around the world. Typically, the reasons given for this demographic crisis are economic or lifestyle, where couples choose to not have children (or limit to one child) because they either can't afford raising them or prefer to maintain their freedom.

Yet increasingly there are signs that the baby shortage may also be the result of a subtle but potent form of social movement by women refusing to adhere to the traditional gender role of childbearing.

South Korea may be the most extreme example. Since 1950, the Asian nation has registered an astonishing 86% decline in birth rates. The world’s 29th most populous country now has the lowest birth rate of any country worldwide. In 2020, the country reached a so-called “death cross,” the point where a country’s annual deaths outnumber new births.

Though some of this slowing follows trends in development and economic growth seen more generally, South Korean women have increasingly been standing up to a patriarchal society, in which they are relegated to the role of “baby-making machines.”

According to South Korean daily Sisa Times, many more women than men do not want to have children. While roughly half (48%) of Korean men don’t want kids, that number rises to 65% for women. These gender differences also extend beyond parenthood, and overlap into the dating and marriage sphere.

Last year, Yonhap News Agency reported that “Women were found to have a higher proportion of voluntary non-relationships than men, and their future love intentions, marriage intentions, and childbirth intentions were all lower than men.”

South Korea’s government has responded to declining birth rates with drastic measures, including investments of 280 trillion won ($210 billion) over 16 years into programs aimed at increasing birth rates, which include monthly stipends for parents with children.

Discriminatory parental dynamic

Still, Korean women are reluctant to enter what they view as a discriminatory parental landscape. Media Today Korea reported that discrimination against new mothers and pregnant women is especially common in the country, even in spite of good performance on the job.

When looking at female news broadcasters, the site found that “although they carry out broadcasting duties with outstanding capabilities, the careers of female announcers are being cut short due to pregnancy and childbirth.”

Such phenomena, along with ongoing gender-based violence in Korea, have led to the emergence of the “4B movement” or “Four No” movement, in which young Korean women voluntarily say no to dating, sex, marriage, and raising children. A similar but separate movement, “escape the corset”, has been pushing back against the strict beauty standards in Korea, and women participating in it forgo makeup and beauty procedures in an effort to fight this element of the patriarchal society.

"I realized this society is a system that I cannot accept as a woman”, Bonnie Lee, a woman participating in the 4B movement, told AFP, “From then, any encounter with men — be it marriage or dating — became meaningless to me”.

Poland’s social stipends

In Poland, births are the lowest rate since the end of World War II, undermining the country's economic growth, and ever resistant to the government's years-long push to incentive families to have children. Such measures included the 500+ (later increased to 800+) a government program introduced by the outgoing Law and Justice party, which promised a monthly stipend of 500 złoty (about 115 euro) per child to families with children. Though the program was approved by 70% of Poles, it didn’t have the intended effect of boosting birth rates, which instead dropped by 11% between October 2022 and September 2023.

In my generation, young women took marriage and children for granted.

Amid this demographic crisis, former Prime Minister of Poland, and current leader of the Law and Justice Party, Jarosław Kaczyński, faced intense backlash after claiming in an interview with Interia.pl that women in Poland do not give birth because they drink too much.

"It's largely a cultural issue", Kaczyński said, adding that "In my generation, young women took marriage and children for granted."

The comments not only sparked an outcry from women's groups, but also prompted some to find alternative explanations, framing the demographic crisis in other terms. "Polish women do not want to give birth to children because they do not feel safe," said Member of the Sejm Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus, who cited "lack of financial stability", and lack of affordable housing options as the defining reasons behind this. "They are afraid to get pregnant because they are afraid that the doctor will not help them if their fetus is irreversibly damaged," she added, citing the 2020 decision by Poland's Constitutional Tribunal to ban abortions in the case of "severe fetal abnormalities."

In spite of the mass participation in recent national protests, which were compared to Poland’s legendary Solidarność (Solidarity) movement that helped overthrow communism in the 1980s, the abortion law was upheld and Poland remains one of two EU countries (along with Malta) to continue to have highly restrictive abortion laws.

Women's choice

Women can now only have abortions when their life is considered to be at risk, or in the case of rape or incest. Once again, the Polish state’s decision had the opposite effect than intended. While ahead of the court’s decision, Kantar polls reported that 53% of Poles supported abortion up to 12 weeks on demand; after the ruling, 73% of Poles responded that they did not support the ruling. Even politicians who were once supportive of the ruling, including former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, have now backtracked. “The application to the Constitutional Tribunal in this case was a mistake”, he said.

It may take years to gauge its deeper impact on the desire of women to have children.

Though it sought demographic growth in Poland, the former PiS government also liquidated state funding for in vitro fertilization procedures, which are in opposition to the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Many women worldwide are choosing to have children at a later date, the popularity of these procedures has increased, and in Poland specifically, 55% of women give birth after age 30.

Combined with the outward resentment towards the government policies, these measures have made it more difficult for women who want children to have them past a certain age range, further impacting Polish demographics.

It is unclear if Poland's new centrist government will try to overturn the abortion law, but it may take years to gauge its deeper impact on the desire of women to have children. And elsewhere in the world, demographers and politicians alike should not forget that the decision to have children will, ever more, be in the hands of the world's women.