Something UNSTOPPABLE Is Wiping North Korea Off the Map

On December third, twenty twenty-three, Kim Jong Un sat on a stage in Pyongyang in front of a hall of mothers and cried.

It was the National Conference of Mothers, the first in eleven years.

State television ran the footage.

He takes out a white handkerchief, dabs at his eyes, and tells the room that preventing a decline in birth rate is a housekeeping duty they all need to handle together.

A man with a nuclear arsenal asking politely.

He had already tried everything that wasn't polite.

Abortion had been illegal in North Korea since the famine of the nineteen nineties.

Selling contraceptive privately became a crime.

Families with four children get extra food.

Families raising six get a house.

And according to a defector who lived in Pyongyang, you need two children before you can take an administrative post.

Food, housing, employment, the police, and the courts, he owns all of it.

He used all of it.

South Korea's statistics agency put the North's fertility rate at just under one point eight and drifting down.

The UN has it about the same.

Both of those are estimates, and I'll come back to why that matters.

Replacement, the level where a population holds steady, is two point one.

North Korea last cleared that bar in nineteen ninety-six, thirty years.

Four separate policy pushes, the line has not moved once.

The strongest argument against everything I've just told you is a good one, so let me put it properly.

That number is not a disaster.

On paper, it's the healthiest fertility rate in Northeast Asia.

South Korea sits at point eight.

Japan is well below the North.

So is China.