[News Today] RURAL MATERNITY CLINICS CRISIS

[LEAD]
October 10th marked Pregnant Women day in Korea. This day was established in 2006 to address declining birth rates. Despite this, the number of newborns continues to fall each year. Another major concern is that available obstetrics and gynecology departments are declining sharply in rural areas. Let's take a look.

[REPORT]
This young mother is currently staying at a postnatal care center to take care of her one-month-old baby-girl.

Although she lives on Soando Island in Wando-gun County, Jeollanam-do Province, she gave birth to her child at an obstetrics clinic in Gwangju.

She was hospitalized one week before delivery to receive a C-section.

Chung Ji-an / Mother of infant (Wando-gun resident)
It takes three hours by boat to reach Gwangju, six hours round-trip. I could deliver my baby at any moment.

Although there are such clinics in Wando, they stopped providing child delivery services in 2010 because the number of newborns plunged.

Jeon Yi-yang / Director, Wando Daesung Medical Center
There were only about ten newborns a month. We could not maintain our child delivery facilities that way.

The percentage of general and university hospitals in large cities where child delivery services are still provided has also plummeted by 35% in the past 10 years.

Sohn Min-joo/ KBS reporter
This large maternity hospital in Gwangju was closed last year, 17 years after its opening, because the child delivery rate declined sharply.

The situation is even worse at small clinics.

Of some 1,300 obstetrics and gynaecology community clinics nationwide, 88.4% did not request medical fees associated with child deliveries as of July this year, meaning nearly 90% of all such clinics in the nation do not provide child delivery services.

Of the 250 cities and counties in the country, more than 60 counties have zero maternity clinics.

Na Ha-na/ Recently gave birth (Wando-gun resident)
I even blamed the area where I live, because access to maternity hospitals is so much better in large cities.

The government has been providing support to maternity hospitals so far, but the number of vulnerable areas in terms of child birth doubled last year from 52 in 2011.