Nurses tend to newborns at a hospital nursery in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, July 24.
Yonhap Korea’s rebound in births is reviving interest in the market for prenatal insurance, prompting insurers to broaden coverage and introduce new policy riders as they compete to lock in young families as long-term customers, according to industry officials, Tuesday.
Over the January-May period, 122,694 babies were born, up 15.2 percent from the same period a year earlier, according to the Ministry of Data and Statistics.
The country’s total fertility rate — the average number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime — also rose to 0.85 in May from 0.75 a year earlier.
The improvement has been attributed in part to a postpandemic rise in marriages and a temporary increase in the number of women in their 30s, the country’s prime childbearing years.
