UN Secretary of Sustainability Praises Korea's World Leading Fight Against Overpopulation

While countries like India and France continuing multiplying like earth-raping rabbits, Jans Feyrn, the UN's Head Undersecretary of Sustainability praised Korea's commitment to population control.  "Korea's birthrate is one of the lowest in the world; while other countries' populations are ballooning and raising worries that the planet's finite resources cannot sustain them, Korea's work in the area of birthrate reduction has been seminal, and is a model for other countries to emulate."

Overpopulation is an awkward area of study, and a controversial one: most other cases of excellent population control have come along with either destructive wars ("Korea had one of those, too," notes Jans Fejrn, excitedly), totalitarian regimes (Last year, Kim Jong Il and his oppressive regime won the Rousseau Award, joining past recipients like Josef Stalin and Chairman Mao, for biggest proportional population decreases in a single year), or fierce resistance from religious groups- "Our agency once drew up a plan to have abortion clinics attached to Dunkin Donuts shops in the US, only to have it smothered by Church resistance."  However, Korea's population control has followed an entirely new model.

"We commend Korea for developing a multi-pronged approach.  Many other landmark population control leaders have focused too much on one area, for example the elimination of actual or perceived political enemies or rivals; others have only managed significant population declines at the cost of infrastructure and government collapses, which leads to packs of roving refugees. These old models are also too often associated with atrocities and horrors, giving population control a bad name."

Instead of following the old models, Korea has attached so much shame on the act of female extramarital sex, and so much financial burden on unmarried child-rearers, that all abortions are voluntary: even going through the motions of toughening legislation against them cannot surmount the inflexible stigma against unwed mothers.  Meanwhile, the atmosphere of hypercompetitiveness and cripplingly long hours demanded by the work culture make it unfeasible for women to work and raise children.  "It's ingenious!" gushes Fejyrn, "while those pesky women's and human rights groups are appeased by putting the laws in the books, social mores have crystallized and rendered moot all the legislation in the world!  Stalin could never have been clever enough to force all the women in his nation to opt out of childbearing for fear of feeling socially obligated to either quit their jobs or be branded as bad mothers."

According to Feyrn, and his agency's June report, "Korean Population Control: A Contrast of Models, North and South: Stalin vs. Socialization," in Korea, even if one chooses to have children, the pressure to send kids to a top school, and the associated pressure to dedicate the entire family budget to private schooling, have created an atmosphere where people truly feel it's their own choice to avoid or delay having children, rather than writing and enforcing punitive laws against having too many children, as has raised controversy in China.  "While controlling overpopulation, the goverment uses social mores and conventions, and the perception of obligations, and the fear of being judged by peers, to appear squeaky clean to rights groups, while still reducing the birthrate to world-best levels!"

So how can other countries imitate Korea's model?  "It'd take a complex strategy;"  A full implementation of the Korean model would require simultaneously sullying the reputations of all but a very narrow range of careers, and a very small number of universities, in order to increase perceived competition and increase the cost of education to prohibitive levels; creating working conditions which make balancing a career and a family impossible, and raising a generation of men who feel entitled to have a wife who will stay home and raise kids while keeping house without any help from them, so that women feel forced to choose single life over the blind alley of marriage... but with careful social planning and manipulation of public perception, all three could probably be accomplished at once.

Now, Feyrn's eyes look off in the distance, dreamily: "When the whole world is like Korea, we will finally be out of danger of over-taxing the world's resources, and environmental meltdown will cease to be a legitimate danger to humanity.  We hope the entire rest of the world implements twelve-hour workdays, if every family on Earth felt that their children must become Doctors, Lawyers, or shames to their families, we might be on our way to environmental salvation, and true sustainability!"