Low Income Koreans Finding It Increasingly Hard to Marry and Have Kids

Everyone has to make their own personal decision about whether or not to have kids and the man featured in this article decided raising kids with limited financial resources was not for him:

Shin Ji-hoon, 33, went to the hospital for a vasectomy in February. An office worker, he is in his fourth year of marriage. Shin and his wife had given up on the idea of children for financial reasons, and he thought he needed a more reliable form of birth control. “I’m not very well off myself, and I figured that I would end up leaving my kids in an even worse position. After deciding not to have a child, I settled on a surefire way of eliminating the possibility of pregnancy,” he said.Shin felt sorry about having had his wife get prescriptions for “morning after” pills. These days, he says, vasectomy often comes up in conversation with people he knows. “When I hang out with friends my age, we often have debates about whether it’s even possible to raise kids,” he said.

Vasectomies once symbolized the South Korean government’s policy of decreasing the birthrate. During the 1960s, the government covered the cost of vasectomies as part of its family planning program; in the 1970s, it gave men who had vasectomies an advantage in bidding for apartments.But the government did an about-face when South Korea’s birthrate tanked. At the end of 2004, the government even eliminated coverage for vasectomies under national health insurance. But despite government policy, the story of this man in his 30s who rejected the idea of having children and decided to have a vasectomy reflects the harsh truth of South Korean society, in which people can’t have children even when they want to.  [Hankyoreh]

You can read more at the link, but falling birthrates are sign of a modernizing country.  So unless South Korea wants to import a huge amount of immigrants that could lead to social problems down the road they are going to have to look for ways to reduce the costs of raising kids to really improve the birthrate.