For years, local officials in South Korea, which has one of the world’s lowest birthrates, have tried ever more inventive plans to encourage women to have babies.
They have offered generous maternity-leave policies, cash allowances and even boxes of beef and baby clothes to families with newborns.
Then the national government tried its hand.
On Thursday, it rolled out an online “birth map” that used shades of pink to rank towns and cities by the number of women of childbearing age. However, the reaction was so overwhelmingly negative, especially among women, that the Web site was shut down within hours of its introduction.
“They counted fertile women like they counted the number of livestock,” an angry blogger wrote in a commentary. “Did they think that men would flock to a town with more childbearing-age women?”
A low birthrate is one of South Korea’s most urgent socioeconomic challenges. Amid rising costs of living and education, women are increasingly moving into the job market, but they often find it all but impossible to keep their careers and raise children.
South Korea’s fertility rate, as high as six babies per woman in 1960, plunged to around 1.2 per woman in recent years, well below the “replacement level” of 2.1 children, a rate that allows a society to maintain its population without migration.
The map showed regions with a higher number of women of childbearing age colored in dark pink. The color lightened for regions with a smaller number of such women. The map also ranked the regions by birthrate, and provided information on benefits local governments offered to families with babies.
According to the map, Haenam, a county in the southwest of then nation, ranked No. 1 with 2.46 babies per woman. Jongro, a ward in central Seoul, ranked at the bottom, with a rate of 0.81.
When the birth map was introduced, the South Korean Ministry of the Interior said it was intended to “promote competition” among towns to produce more babies.
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