Roving Periscope: After China and Russia, N. Korea also wants women to have more kids!

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: Facing critically declining birth rates and workforce, and ballooning pension and health bills for the longer-living elderly, North Korea became the third dictatorship in Asia after China and Russia to ask its women to produce more children.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, while appealing to women to have more kids, even cried and wiped tears, the media reported on Wednesday.

Notorious for his brutal behavior, Kim was, however, seen wiping tears as he urged thousands of his country-women to have more babies and stop the decline in birth rates. The video showing him dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief went viral globally.

“Preventing a decline in birth rates and good childcare are all of our housekeeping duties we need to handle while working with mothers,” Kim said at an event for mothers in Pyongyang on Sunday.

He urged the mothers to join in to tackle a host of social tasks that the country is confronted with. These tasks include bringing up children to steadfastly carry forward their revolution and eliminate non-socialist practices, as well as promote family harmony and social unity, establishing a sound cultural and moral life.

He thanked the mothers for their role in strengthening national power. “I often think of mothers when I have a hard time dealing with the party or the state’s work.”

Extending a fall in the fertility rates during the recent decades, North Korea’s 2023 fertility rate stood at 1.8, according to the United Nations Population Fund. However, this poor country’s fertility rate has been higher than some of its neighbours who are also dealing with a similar downward trend.

North Korea has a population of about 25 million people. In recent decades, it faced challenges like food shortages and a deadly famine in the 1990s.

South Korea also witnessed a drop in fertility rate to a record low of 0.78 last year, while Japan saw it reduced to 1.26. The dropping birth rates have also caused a shortage of pediatricians in South Korea.

In the last few months, China and Russia have also urged their women to have more babies.

Only last week, President Vladimir Putin also urged Russian women to have “eight or more” children. His remarks were seen in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine in which Russia has suffered a high number of casualties, including soldiers.

Addressing the World Russian People’s Council meeting in Moscow on Tuesday, he urged women to make large families the “norm.”  Boosting Russia’s population will be “our goal for the coming decades.”

Russia’s birth rate has been falling since the 1990s. It also suffered over 300,000 casualties since the start of the Ukraine War in February last year, The Independent said in a report.

“Many of our ethnic groups have preserved the tradition of having strong multigenerational families with four, five, or even more children. Let us remember that Russian families, many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven, eight, or even more children,” he said.

“Let us preserve and revive these excellent traditions. Large families must become the norm, a way of life for all of Russia’s people. The family is not just the foundation of the state and society, it is a spiritual phenomenon, a source of morality,” he added.

“Preserving and increasing the population of Russia is our goal for the coming decades and even generations ahead. This is the future of the Russian world, the millennium-old, eternal Russia,” Putin said.

The conference was organized by the head of Russia’s Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, and was attended by representatives of several traditional organizations in Russia, said The Independent.

Though his comments did not directly refer to the scale of casualties suffered by Russian soldiers in the Ukraine War, many outlets linked it to the conflict.

The UK’s defense ministry said the number of dead in Ukraine had likely crossed 300,000. An independent Russian policy group claimed an estimated 820,000-920,000 people fled the country after the Ukraine war began in February 2022.

Russia is also witnessing a severe workforce shortage and an increasing economic slowdown due to sanctions imposed by the West in the wake of the Ukraine War.

The Independent said that Russia’s population was 146,447,424 on January 1, 2023, lower than the figure in 1999 when Putin assumed the presidency.

Even China, until recently the world’s most populous country, is worried about declining birth rates. For 35 years (1980 to 2015) it maintained a strictly one-child policy, subjecting millions of women to forced contraception, forced sterilization, and abortion. Now, because of plummeting birth rates, the government desperately wants women to have more children.

Since 2016, therefore, Beijing moved swiftly from a one- to two- to three-child policy. These changes were buttressed with tax cuts, subsidies, cash rewards, and other incentives, and laced with propaganda about the virtue and duty of having more children, the media reported.

But none of these have worked well so far. China’s birth rate continues to drop. The total fertility rate decreased from 2.6 in the late 1980s to just 1.15 in 2021. In fact, in 2022, the population might have declined for the first time since the Great Famine of 1959 to 1961, according to a projection by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

When the government announced the three-child policy in June 2021, it was met with widespread cynicism online. For Chinese women, a significant reason for their unwillingness to have more children is the unequal burden of childcare responsibilities they would shoulder and its potentially detrimental impact on their careers.

No wonder few women want a third child. According to a 2022 online survey of professional women by the job search website Zhilian Zhaopin, only 0.8 percent of respondents said they wanted to have three children.

A 2020 study on the impact of family planning policy changes on urban women by the Women’s Studies Institute of China reported that 45 percent of respondents said their employment was negatively affected by pregnancy or childrearing. Over one-third reported income loss, and more than 20 percent described losing opportunities for training or promotions. Another 13 percent said they were fired or forced to resign, and eight percent said they experienced demotion.