Here’s a bit of interesting news.
While we here in the United States fight to keep the government from promoting abortion through our taxpayer dollars the opposite seems to be happening on the other side of the world in South Korea.
Recently John Sudworth, of BBC News, reported that the South Korean Ministry of Health shut down its operations earlier than usual in an attempt to encourage its employees to go home and spend time with their families, hopefully making bigger ones. Why, ? because South Korea happens to have an extremely low birth rate and an aging population. According to the article even Japan’s birth rates are higher than that of South Korea’s which is astonishing.
This is seen as a serious issue by the government due to “falling levels of manpower and spiralling health care costs” as quoted in the BBC article. To counter-act decline in birth rate, this experimental, early, end-of-the-day is hoped to be repeated every month. It certainly seems that the Ministry of Health believes its staff should set the tone for the rest of South Korea in encouraging “family life.”
Another interesting little tidbit found in the article on the BBC website is that at the Ministry of Health, “Generous gift vouchers are on offer for officials who have more than one child, and the department organises social gatherings in the hope of fostering love amongst its bureaucrats.” Even money is being given to people for having children. What a turn-a-round!
Many criticize the new “Family Day”, however, stating that the government is encouraging larger families without taking into account the drawbacks to having numerous children. For instance, the cost of education and childcare is very expensive, and thus they are a major road-block, especially to the young people of South Korea interested in starting families.
But, hey, they are at least heading in the right direction. If the South Koreans want bigger families they are going to have to make it an attainable goal, the motto being, ”the bigger the better”. Yet here, while bigger families are more attainable, government seems to be promoting the opposite mantra. Instead of something along the lines of “the more the merrier,” we get, “the more, the drearier.”
Fascinating, no?
