Jung Min-ho has worked as a staff writer at The Korea Times since 2012, mostly covering social and political issues. He currently belongs to the Politics & City Desk where he covers topics such as health, labor and human rights. Prior to joining the team, he was responsible for covering North Korea and sports. His article about a biosecurity breach of Middle East respiratory syndrome won him an award from the Korea Science Journalists Association in 2016. He is also the co-author of the book, "Medical Pioneers of Korea" (2019). He served as the head of the international relations committee at the Journalists Association of Korea from 2021 to 2023.
Korea's birthrate uptick masks demographic crisis, advocate warns
Hwang In-ja, executive representative at the Federation for Korean Families (FKF), speaks during an interview at Press Center in Seoul, May 7. Courtesy of FKF
By Jung Min-ho
Korea’s slight rebound in births should not lull politicians into a false sense of security, said a leading family policy advocate, calling for mayoral and gubernatorial candidates to treat low birthrates as an urgent structural crisis rather than a past problem.
“We may have seen a rebound, but the current numbers are nowhere near a level where we can feel complacency,” Hwang In-ja, executive representative at the Federation for Korean Families and former lawmaker, said during an interview in Seoul, May 7. “This still is a national crisis and in Seoul it is even more serious. The city’s total fertility rate last year was 0.63.”
Hwang said her organization began preparing for the June 3 local elections late last year out of concern that birthrate policy was slipping down the political agenda.
“In the past five years or so, low fertility was at the center of every election,” she said. “But as soon as the numbers ticked up a little, we saw candidates losing interest. We created this manifesto precisely to wake them up again.”
Hwang said the upcoming elections should be a starting point for reshaping how the state thinks about families, rather than a one-off test of candidates’ campaign pledges.
She argued that the government’s approach, not the size of its ever-growing budget, has doomed past efforts.
“The core problem is fragmented policy,” she said. “Women’s policy, child policy and senior policy all move in their own lanes. In that kind of fragmented bureaucracy, families end up falling through the cracks. That is the basic structural reason these policies keep failing.”
Rather than arguing over how much more cash to hand out, she said, the focus should be on building an environment in which families can sustain themselves.
“We need to tear down the gender- and age-based compartments inside government and create a unified control tower,” she said. “Our manifesto calls for the establishment of a ‘family happiness integration office’ that reports directly to the mayor and brings all major family-related functions under one roof.”
Hwang added this institutional shift must be backed by broader social changes in education and culture.
“We will keep track of which candidates genuinely embrace a family-centered philosophy of city governance and make that information available to citizens,” she said. “Our manifesto does not take the side of any particular party or ideology. We stand not with conservatives or progressives, but only with family, life and the future.”