YUP, TEN MILLION REVERSE VASECTOMIES OUGHT TO SOLVE IT

A new Korean goal: Having a big family (Norimitsu Onishi, International Herald Tribune, August 22nd, 2005)

After decades of promoting smaller families, South Korea - like several other affluent Asian countries facing plummeting birthrates - is desperately seeking ways to get people to have more babies.

In South Korea, the decline has been so precipitous that it caught the government off guard. Medical treatments like vasectomies and tubal ligations were covered under the national health plan until last year, as part of policies devised to discourage more than two children. This year, the plan began covering reverse procedures for those two operations, as well as care for a couple's third or fourth child.

"I'd been thinking about getting the operation for a while, but was concerned about the cost," said Park, 37, who runs the Samsung Electronics store in this seaside town on the southern shore of the Korean peninsula.

In sharp contrast to countries like China or India, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong have experienced quick economic growth and social changes that have produced disturbingly low birthrates that are transforming their societies and threatening their economic strength. In an ethnically homogenous nation like South Korea, as in Japan, there is no support for the kind of immigration that has increased birthrates in some Western nations.

"In the next two or three years, we won't be able to increase the birthrate," said Park Ha Jeong, a director-general in the Health Ministry. "But we have to stop the decline, or it will be too late."

Young couples in Seoul and other cities are choosing to have few babies, but the low birthrate has hit rural places like Wando County hardest. Within less than a decade, it has transformed South Korea's rural landscape - shuttering schools, shrinking class sizes and setting off village-wide celebrations for the rare birth of a baby.

Growing up here, Park Pil Soo has watched family sizes shrink to fewer than two children from as many as eight, and Wando's population decreases year by year. People have grown richer here. At his Samsung store, residents began buying air-conditioners four years ago, and they expect television sets in each room and a refrigerator just for kimchi.

"People now want a higher living standard instead of children," he said, as he and his wife attended to customers on a recent Saturday.

Wando's was the first local government to supplement the national health insurance to make reverse vasectomies and tubal ligations free. So far, five men and two women have had the surgeries, said Hwang Dae Rae, the county official who came up with the idea.

Hwang, the official, regularly calls the couples to inquire about possible "good news." None has been reported so far.

It is going to be very amusing, in a tragi-comic sort of way, to watch bureaucracies in Europe and Asia scramble to come up with creative initiatives to make their comfortable, secularized and self-regarding populations re-discover the joys of duty and delayed gratification.