Before you get too far into the title, no this does not involve us. This post is actually about an interesting trend that we had seen here in Korea. It was about 2 months ago, when we went across the street to the mall and we just decided to walk around. While at the mall, I swear that we saw a good 30 women that were pregnant at least. They were everywhere. We started to wonder if the government was paying people to give birth or if they were obsessed with trying to produce little ones.
It turns out that we were not completely off about it. Turns out, that Korea does have a very low birth rate and a rapidly aging population that it is trying to turn around by making it more of an incentive to have kids. We also learned from a friend of ours, that once a Korean woman gets married its almost expected that she produce children... in fact, it is considered an issue of the bedroom variety if the woman does not get pregnant on the honeymoon. That's definitely a lot of pressure placed on the couple when your entire family is expecting that you produce kids right off the bat. We have also noticed that the women tend to have kids that are very close in age, so if you see a lady with a 1 or 2 year old child, there is an above average chance that she is pregnant with another child. I personally find it amazing since I would say it be quite expensive to raise a child in this country, and I am sometimes shocked with how often you see pregnant women here.
After this Seoul trip, I realized that the only thing that the Koreans have more of than cellphones, is babies.
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