Korea discovers at least 2,000 babies not registered upon birth

Social Affairs

Published: 22 Jun. 2023, 16:04 Updated: 08 Sep. 2023, 00:17

Korea discovers at least 2,000 babies not registered upon birth

Lee Ki-il, vice health minister, announces government plan to trackdown newborns that have not yet been registered since they were born. [YONHAP]

Two unregistered babies were found to have been murdered by their mother and kept in a freezer for years, the Board of Audit and Inspection in Korea (BAI) said on Thursday.

The institute, discovering that as many as 2,236 babies born between 2015 and 2022 had not been registered by their parents, asked the police to look into 23 babies deemed particularly at risk of harm.

The police found that two were born to the same mother. In their investigation, they discovered the two babies had been murdered by their mother and kept in the freezer in her home in Suwon, Gyeonggi.

The mother, a 35-year-old, admitted to the police that she had killed them. One was born in 2018 and another in 2019.

The 23 babies were deemed at high risk by the BAI because their parents refused to respond to their calls or failed to register more than one child born in their family.

Another case involved a baby born in 2021, whom the parents told the police had been “handed off to an unknown person” after birth. A local police precinct in Gyeonggi was looking into the case as of Thursday.

In yet another case, a baby born in 2022 in Changwon, South Gyeongsang, died of malnutrition 76 days after birth. Some babies, the BAI found via the police, were found to have been abandoned in a baby box after their birth.

The BAI said the majority of the children missing their birth registration had fallen victim to crime and were often placed in a blind spot when it came to government welfare programs.

The BAI handed over all of the 2,236 babies’ information to the Health Ministry for a complete inspection.

The largest share of the unregistered babies were born in Gyeonggi, at 641, followed by Seoul at 470 and Incheon at 157, according to the BAI. There were at least 50 unregistered babies each in Daegu, Busan, Daejeon, Gangwon and the Chungcheong, Jeolla and Gyeongsang regions.

In Korea, if the parent fails to register the child upon their birth, hospitals do not have a right to register the child on the parent’s behalf. The Health Ministry has been pushing for an amendment to relevant laws to grant hospitals this right, but it has faced some opposition from some medical institutes.

The government on Thursday said it will track down the whereabouts of children who were not properly registered.

“Regarding the death of the infants in Suwon reported today, I apologize to the public for our society’s failure to protect children who were born,” said Lee Ki-il, vice health minister. “We will conduct a sweeping investigation jointly with the police, the disease control and prevention agency and the local government to track down all of the newborns who were given temporary numbers.”

Infants and toddlers have faced increasing dangers to their welfare in recent years.

The Covid-19 lockdown after 2020 put children, especially infants and toddlers, at risk with government agencies failing to keep track of the welfare situation in lower income families.

A mother who kept the corpse of her 15-month daughter in a plastic kimchi container for over two years was sentenced to seven years in prison.

While the cause of death was not determined, the court ruled it was due to negligence by the mother, who frequently left the daughter alone at home while visiting her husband in prison five hours away.

The 35-year-old mother, who hid the corpse of her 15-month-old daughter in a plastic container since 2020, being arrested by the Pocheon police in December 2022. [YONHAP]

BY ESTHER CHUNG [chung.juhee@joongang.co.kr]