S. Korea grapples with declining childbirths, looming uncertainties for its future
In its heyday, the hospital was known as one of South Korea's best medical institutions for pregnant women, with around 9,500 babies being born there annually. Now few, if any, visitors are seen in the 300-bed hospital, and there has not been much for medical staff to do since early November, when the hospital closed its maternity ward, Yonhap reports.
"No babies are born here anymore as all the obstetricians have left," a hospital official said.
The country's stubbornly low birthrate, which the government has so far been unable to boost, has plagued Asia's fourth-largest economy for more than a decade. The number of births in South Korea fell to 358,000 in 2017 from a record high of 1 million in 1970, according to the country's statistics agency, in a dramatic demographic transition that has no known parallel in contemporary history.
The decline appears to have been sparked by birth control policy in the 1960s and '70s that was intended to stem rapid population growth at a time when South Korea was rebuilding its economy from the ashes of the 1950-53 Korean War.
In the 1960s, a government slogan warned that people could "end up penniless if they give birth to children blindly." South Korea's per capita gross national income -- a gauge of the population's purchasing power -- was just US$80 in 1960, compared with $29,744 in 2017.
The birth control policy lowered the country's total fertility rate -- the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime -- to 1.05 in 2017 from 4.53 in 1970, when the government began to compile relevant data.
The 2017 figure is far below the replacement level of 2.1 that would keep South Korea's population stable at 51 million. Statistics Korea is set to release the 2018 data on childbirth next week, and the annual total could fall below the 358,000 mark.
"I am not optimistic about the possibility that the number of newborn babies will go up, given the trend of the dwindling population," said Kim Cheong-seok, a sociology professor at Dongguk University and a member of the Population Association of Korea.
In a sign of the declining birthrate, eight out of 75 cities, and 23 out of 69 counties, across the country have no maternity hospitals, according to the National Medical Center.
The Cheil General Hospital & Women's Healthcare Center got a big boost in 1995, when Samsung Group, South Korea's largest family-run conglomerate, began to manage it. Samsung taking over was a dying wish expressed by hospital founder Lee Dong-hee to his cousin, Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Kun-hee. The relationship ended in 2006, when the founder's son, Lee Jae-kon, took the hospital over.
The declining number of childbirths meant fewer deliveries at the hospital, which in turn worsened its financial woes.
The hospital recorded an operating loss of 100 million won ($89,000) in 2012 -- the first since its foundation in 1963 -- and its losses ballooned to 9.6 billion won in 2016, according to the hospital official.
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