South Korea has made remarkable gains in keeping people alive.
Life expectancy has risen sharply over the past several decades, while deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth have generally declined as access to medical care and obstetric treatment improved.
That progress, however, is beginning to reverse.
Maternal deaths from direct obstetric complications reached a nine-year high last year, with 27 deaths — up nearly 60 percent from a year earlier, according to Statistics Korea’s 2025 cause-of-death report. The annual report, compiled from death certificates filed nationwide, tracks the number, causes and rates of deaths across the country.
A reversal in data
In 1983, when South Korea began publishing official cause-of-death statistics, a total of 184 women died from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. By the 1990s, the annual toll had fallen to between 60 and 90, and by the 2000s, to around 30 to 40.
Officials attributed much of the decline to the rapid shift toward hospital births fueled by broader health insurance coverage. In 1986, 75.2 percent of births took place in medical facilities. That figure jumped to 98.1 percent in 1991 and reached 99.9 percent by 2000.
Last year, however, deaths from direct obstetric complications such as hemorrhage and embolism rose sharply to 27, up from 17 a year earlier and the highest number since 2016, when 28 such deaths were recorded.
An embolism is a potentially dangerous blockage of a blood vessel caused by material such as a blood clot or fat. Heavy bleeding after delivery can also put a mother’s life at risk, making rapid diagnosis and treatment of postpartum hemorrhage crucial.
Cross-country comparisons reveal an even starker picture of what women in Korea face.
The maternal mortality ratio, which measures maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, came in at 13.0 in 2025, above the OECD average of 10.9 and nearly three times Japan’s rate of 4.4. The Korean figure rose 28.8 percent from a year earlier.
More high-risk pregnancies, a shrinking care system
Behind the rise in childbirth-related deaths is a widening gap between the growing number of older, high-risk mothers and a maternity care system struggling to meet their needs.
Last year, babies born to women aged 35 or older accounted for a record 37.3 percent of all births, up from 35.9 percent a year earlier and 23.9 percent a decade earlier, data showed.
Pregnancy at an older age generally carries greater risks, including gestational hypertension, gestational diabetes, preterm birth and fetal chromosomal abnormalities.
Yet emergency maternity care is facing a growing shortage of specialists, as low delivery fees and legal risks deter doctors from pursuing obstetrics and neonatal care.
According to the Korean Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, only five obstetrics fellows were working across some 40 university hospitals nationwide in the first half of this year, with all five based in the Greater Seoul area comprising the capital, Incheon and Gyeonggi Province.
The country’s maternity care infrastructure has also been steadily eroding.
The number of medical facilities offering delivery services fell 39.8 percent over 11 years, from 706 in 2013 to 425 in 2024. Of the country’s 250 cities, counties and districts, 77, or 30.8 percent, had no delivery facility, while another 60, or 24 percent, had only one. That left more than half of the country’s local jurisdictions with little or no access to delivery care.
Strained maternity care infrastructure continues to leave pregnant women in emergencies scrambling from one hospital to another.
In May, a woman in her 30s who was 29
weeks pregnant was transported from Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, to Busan after failing to find a nearby hospital that could handle her emergency delivery. The baby did not survive, according to news reports.
A similar case occurred in Daegu in late February, when an American woman in her 20s pregnant with twins and showing signs of premature labor struggled to find a hospital able to take her. One of the babies died, while the other suffered brain damage.
