At 32, with a thriving corporate career that showed no signs of slowing down, Jenny Guo was not fully prepared to settle down. So he froze his eggs.
But in Taiwan, which is struggling with an aging population and fear of an impending crisis, Ms. Guo cannot touch them until she marries.
This catch-22 highlights a dilemma that is taking place in East Asia, with governments that previously tried to suppress population growth now facing the threat of a significant decline over the next few years. three decades.
Projections show that Japan and Taiwan will experience the biggest falls, with projected falls of around 13% compared to current figures for 2050.
South Korea, with the lowest fertility rate in the world, is expected to shrink by about 8%, while China will shrink by about 3%, ensuring that India soon surpasses it as the most populous country in the world.
A number of issues are dragging down the East Asian birth rate. (ABC News: Mitch Woolnough)
East Asian countries and cities such as Hong Kong and Macao rank five of the six lowest places on the CIA World Factbook fertility estimate.
Many are looking for creative solutions to encourage more births, but experts say the problem may be deeply rooted in cultural and economic life.
The race to fix an aging population in Taiwan
Taiwan’s aging crisis is especially severe, given the concern about recruiting enough young soldiers fit for its armed forces to deter a possible Chinese invasion before 2049.
By at least one estimate, Taiwan’s fertility rate is even lower than that of South Korea.
The growing imbalance of aging will lead to more retirees, higher health care demands and fewer young workers to pay the tax burden.
“Taiwan is facing a shorter time to react because it is happening much faster here,” said Alice Yen-hsin Cheng, one of Taiwan’s leading demographers at Academic Sinica.
“The situation in Ukraine is now getting on the nerves of the Taiwanese government and the Ministry of Defense, because it is already foreseeable that our soldiers will be reduced in number.”
Experts point to a number of problems that drag on the birth rate, some common in many parts of the world, others characteristic of East Asia.
High housing prices and labor barriers for women attract much of the focus, and the economic uncertainty of the COVID pandemic has not helped. There is hope for a modest baby rebound once the pandemic stabilizes.
Taiwan’s fertility rate is especially marked by the low birth rate in East Asia. (ABC News: Mitch Woolnough)
During the pandemic, the Taiwanese government extended subsidies for IVF treatment to all couples, regardless of their income.
Existing incentives to have babies include subsidized daycare, childcare payments and six months of paid parental leave, but they have done little to curb the trend.
For young women of childbearing age like Ms. Guo, there is still an important barrier: finding a husband.
“I don’t know what I want in the future, I’m not so sure if I even want a baby in the future,” she told ABC.
After more than a decade of studying and working abroad, he has now returned to Taiwan with a corporate career working for a multinational company.
“I still don’t want to find a ‘Mr Right’ right now, I’m still working,” he said.
“I’m in a very good environment to develop my career, I don’t want this opportunity to escape us.”
Taiwan faces a low birth rate as its population ages, causing fears of an impending crisis. (ABC News: Mitch Woolnough)
Ms. Guo froze her eggs this year as an “insurance policy,” a measure some friends thought unnecessary.
“They said,‘ just take the time to meet some guys, try to have a relationship, try to find someone you love, someone who loves you with whom you want to have a baby, ’” she said.
“I don’t think we’re discussing things as often.”
But Taiwan’s restrictions mean that Ms. Guo cannot use the eggs she has frozen until she is married, a policy that rules out LGBTQ + couples and single mothers helping to cope with declining populations.
“When IVF clinic staff told me I could only use my frozen eggs when I had a husband registered on my ID card, I was shocked,” she said.
Chi-Huang Chen, head of reproductive medicine at Taipei Medical University Hospital, says many of the clients he sees already have relationships.
“In Taiwan, many women freeze their eggs, not because they are single or unable to find a boyfriend. In many cases, their boys take them to the clinic,” she said.
Dr. Chen attributes the desire to postpone parenting, even between established couples, to deep-rooted economic factors.
“Real estate prices are high, basic wage levels are low, working hours are long and raising a child is too expensive,” he told the ABC.
“And if you’re a woman who goes back to work after taking time off to have a baby, you can be discriminated against in your career.”
From a one-child policy to guardianship repression
Egg freezing is growing in popularity in Taiwan, and until Chinese citizens were banned from visiting the island for tourism in 2019, clinics such as Dr. Chen’s attracted a significant number of Chinese women.
Freezing of non-medical eggs is banned in China because of the potential for illegal sex selection testing during the early stages of the embryo.
There are fears that the aging population of Taiwan could jeopardize their ability to recruit fit young soldiers. (ABC News: Mitch Woolnough)
The same economic factors that are reducing the birth rate in Taiwan have caused the Chinese government to quickly reverse its infamous one-child policy to the current limit of three children as the aging crisis deepens.
Chinese couples may have two children since 2016, which rose to three in 2021.
In one of the most extraordinary measures to encourage births, China’s leader Xi Jinping also wiped out the country’s multibillion-dollar private tutoring industry.
The plan was to ban for-profit providers in an effort to alleviate the financial burden of competitive extracurricular education on future generations of parents.
During the pandemic, the Taiwanese government introduced some measures to financially help couples going through IVF. (ABC News: Mitch Woolnough)
Individual businesses and provincial governments have been handing out all sorts of incentives, from baby payments to low-cost home loans.
So far, however, efforts to provoke a baby boom in China are failing, and recent statistics from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences suggest that 2022 is the turning point for population decline. .
“The turning point came a decade earlier than expected,” wrote Xiujian Peng, a senior researcher at Victoria University.
“The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences team predicts an average annual decline of 1.1% after 2021, which will bring China’s population to 587 million by 2100, less than half of what is currently there “.
Marriage is the main barrier to more children
In East Asia, the average age of marriage for both men and women has risen in recent decades.
It is just below 30 in Japan, 30.4 in Taiwan and 31.6 in South Korea, although the pandemic has probably increased these averages even further.
The average age of Taiwanese women and men getting married is rising. (ABC News: Mitch Woolnough)
Chinese family planning figures for 2016 put the average age of marriage for women at 26.3 years, but the latest statistics from some individual provinces show that it has skyrocketed until the early 1930s.
But accompanied by the increase in age there is a considerable decrease in the total number of people who marry.
Dr. Cheng believes this is the crucial difference between birth rates in Western countries and East Asia.
“In East Asia, there is literally no non-marital part, so if you don’t have enough people [entering] marriages, you won’t see your parents, “he said.
In comparison, France has a higher birth rate of about 1.88 children per woman, but 57% of babies born in 2012 were taken in by unmarried parents.
Some experts say there is still stigma surrounding having a child before marriage in East Asia. (ABC News: Mitch Woolnough)
In Australia, with a record birth rate of 1.58 children per woman in 2020, 36% of these babies were born to unmarried parents, according to ABS figures.
“There are some taboos and stigmas related to non-marital births that I would say are due to the Confucian ideology or teachings that are so common in this part of the world,” Dr. Cheng said.
And that, he believes, will not be easy to change.
“Of course, young people in East Asia have intimate premarital relationships,” she said.
“But when it comes to fertility or motherhood, there is still a very strong consensus spanning generations that having a child before marriage is really a shame.”
Finding a husband remains a barrier for many young women hoping to have children. (ABC News: Mitchell Woolnough)