North Korean parents of twins are protesting the state’s policy of providing benefits only to families with triplets or multiple children, arguing that raising twins requires equal effort and deserves similar support, a source in Ryanggang province recently told The Daily NK.
North Korea widely promotes the birth of triplets in the media, calling it a sign of prosperity. On Sept. 1, the Rodong Sinmun newspaper reported that the 547th set of triplets born at Pyongyang Maternity Hospital had left the hospital.
North Korea sends women pregnant with triplets to Pyongyang Maternity Hospital, the country’s top obstetric hospital, to give birth. After the babies are born, the families receive intensive care. The state also eases the burden on parents of triplets by caring for the children in local kindergartens before they enter school.
The North Korean authorities provide other benefits to families with triplets, including preferential housing allotments, and have written these benefits into law. However, at a time of low birth rates, these policies are causing discontent among families who have given birth to singletons or twins.
According to the source, local officials sometimes provide free food to a family of triplets in Samjiyon, Ryanggang province. Officials from the provincial and municipal party committees also show constant interest in the family, checking in on them and actively helping them with difficulties.
“Parents who have to raise twins all by themselves get really angry when they hear rumors that families of triplets have received rations,” the source said. “They denounce the unfair measures, saying that they have long given up on receiving rations and that there’s no real difference between having twins and having triplets.”
Another source in North Hwanghae province said that the secretary in charge of the provincial party committee discussed the “superiority of the socialist public health system” at a meeting of managers of local factories and enterprises earlier this month, telling his audience that they should “support parents of triplets by reducing their working hours to strike a balance between work and child-rearing.” He said this would make parents of twins “feel quite distant.”
In addition, the father of triplets at a machine factory in North Hwanghae province was exempted when the province assembled teams of party members to assist in food rescue efforts along the northern border in late July. Parents of twins reacted angrily, complaining that “twin families are also multi-child households.”
“Families of twins have to endure multiple layers of hardship because they do not receive any real benefits, and the woman has to raise the children, provide meals, and perform social tasks if the man has no social position or cannot economically lead the family,” the source said. “So families sometimes leave one of the twins at the orphanage door in the middle of the night.”
“The supreme leader (Kim Jong Un) says that women must have many children for the country to have a bright future, but women today think that having many children is useless,” the source said. “So young people now marry late and try not to have children.”
Kim Jong Un attended both days of the Fifth National Mothers’ Gathering in December, becoming the first North Korean leader to speak at the event since 1961 to mention the declining birthrate.
In his address to the gathering, Kim called having many children an act of patriotism and called for the extension of state benefits to multi-child households – including priority in housing allotments, distribution of food and goods, and medical services – as well as the provision of special subsidies to support their livelihoods and an increase in the number of preferential policies for such families in various ways.
The Daily NK works with a network of sources in North Korea, China, and elsewhere. For security reasons, their identities remain anonymous.
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September 25, 2024 at 07:00AM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)