Did you know that North Korea is currently suffering from extremely low fertility rates? According to United Nations assessments, “the average North Korean woman has a fertility rate of 1.79 children over her lifetime.” Since North Korean women need to have a fertility rate of 2.1 children to maintain the population of 26,244,582 people, this statistic is alarming. President Kim Jong Un was highly emotional at a conference in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. He begged the nation’s women to have more babies. He said it was their duty to revive the country’s declining population. I know what you may be wondering right now, why is the country suffering through this in the first place? Well, it all has to do with the restrictive laws that are implemented in North Korea.
In North Korea, there has never been freedom of religion. Nobody in North Korea is allowed to own any kind of scripture or bible, it’s strictly forbidden. What they are allowed to do, and what they’re encouraged to do is to praise and worship Kim Jong Un and his family. Citizens are expected to show some sort of emotion like happiness or tears of joy whenever he is in their presence. Kim Jong Un has a daughter named Kim-Ju-ae, who is only nine years old. Recently she was spotted with Kim Jong Un looking at missiles and looking at performances. Kim Jong Un was also spotted smiling and laughing with his daughter. When Kim Jong Un steps off the throne, his daughter or his sister Kim Yo Jong could potentially rule next. This will make history in North Korea because a woman has never ruled North Korea, it’s always been men.
People who are caught owning scriptures or bibles in North Korea are typically sent to prison camps, or in extreme cases, are even prosecuted. North Koreans who go to prison camps usually spend many years or even their entire lives in harsh conditions. And even if they do make it out of the prison camp alive, they come out in very bad condition. They have to do a lot of hard labor in these prison camps, so you could already have a vivid image of how detrimental this is to their physical and mental health.
Talking about the home style of North Koreans, North Koreans always have to have a portrait of Kim Jong Un somewhere in their house. If inspectors come and see that the portrait of Kim Jong Un is dusty, dirty, or it’s not present, that family could face serious consequences. There is a tragic story in North Korea where a family’s house caught on fire, and the mother, fortunately, escaped the house with her children. Unfortunately, she got in serious trouble and suffered major consequences with the North Korean government because she saved her kids first instead of the portrait of Kim Jong Un that was in her house. This is probably another reason why women don’t want to have children in that country. The government and the men in power care more about their leader than they do about the children, and that’s just inhumane.
Moving onto the education system of North Korea, North Korea has plentiful schools, but all of those schools have something in common. They always teach the children there to hate Americans because they like brainwashing the children there into thinking the USA has attacked them before, and that Americans hate them. So even in schools, children at a young age are taught to hate outsiders.
This brings me back to my point on why North Korean women may not want to have children. If they have children, their children may have to suffer through the same hardships as their parents for the entirety of their lives. Additionally, if you didn’t already know this, North Koreans are not able to travel to any country at any point in their lives, unless they are high-ranking military members with permission to go spy on another country. Essentially, North Koreans don’t know anything about the outside world, social media, or the internet, it’s like they’re living on a different planet.