Brian Lear on WNYC and now I'll wrap up today's show with a story about women's rights

from abroad here in Women's History Month, including a call in if we happen to have any women

listening from South Korea or of Korean descent on the so-called

4B movement to not have children and otherwise limit heterosexual involvement with men in that patriarchal society.

If you have experience with this yourself or with someone you know,

212, 433, WNYC.

For everyone else, have you come across headlines about South Korea's declining birth rate?

The country has held the title of having the lowest fertility rate in the world, but recent statistics

have shown it plummeting even further.

In 2022, as has been reported, the average number of babies a South Korean woman is expected to give birth to during her lifetime fell to 0.72 from 0.78 the year before and projections

estimate that this will fall even further to 0.68 in 2024 according to Al Jazeera.

In other words, women in South Korea are having on, fewer than one child, which means many are having

none. In the capital city of Seoul, the decline is especially concentrated, apparently,

with a reported fertility rate of 0.55, roughly one child per two women.

At this rate, the country's population may be cut in half by 2 and South Koreans as an ethnicity would cease to

exist in 700 years if that trajectory actually continued. So why is this happening?

Well, a massive South Korean women

have chosen this path in a country that exports

visions of handsome chivalric men through the production of

K-pop and K-drama's many women are opting out of relationships with men entirely

participating in what they've dubbed the 4B, number 4, letter B, 4B movement.

They argue that Korean patriarchy is so pervasive that the only way to escape

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