In the first six months of this year, 142,663 babies were born in South Korea, marking the lowest since the Statistics Korea started compiling related data in 1981.
The number of newborns in June dropped to 22,193, down by 7.5 percent from 23,992 in the same month of 2019.
The nation’s fertility rate -- average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime -- came to 0.92 last year, down from 0.98 in 2019.
Meanwhile, the number of people who died during the first quarter reached 152,401, up by 3.7 percent compared to that of last year.
By Shim Woo-hyun (
ws@heraldcorp.com)
