Taiwan’s aging population is one of the defining challenges of the next decade. As more people exit the workforce and fewer are born to replace them, the pressure on labor markets, healthcare, and eldercare will continue to grow. Taiwan’s total fertility rate has fallen to around 0.87, placing it among the lowest in the world.

Taiwan is not alone. South Korea, Japan, and China also show how difficult it is to reverse fertility decline once housing pressure, work culture, delayed marriage, and gender expectations shift. Taiwan’s challenge, then, is not only to ask how births might rise, but how society should function if they do not.

This raises a more uncomfortable policy question: what if Taiwan’s very low fertility is not a temporary abnormality, but a likely structural baseline? Fertility may improve at the margins, and policy should still support people who want children. But it may be risky to design national strategy around the assumption that cash incentives, subsidies, or moral appeals can lift fertility back toward 1.2, 1.5, or replacement level. Taiwan does not need a perfect forecast to plan around this possibility.

This means Taiwan’s fertility challenge should be understood less as a problem of persuasion and more as a problem of governance. Cash transfers, subsidies, and IVF support can help some families, and they are not inherently misguided. A monthly payment may ease part of the economic burden, but it does not decide who leaves work early when a child is sick, who handles school communication, who manages homework and clinic visits, who absorbs the emotional labor of parenting, and whose career becomes easier to interrupt. 

If low fertility is structurally embedded, escalating benefits can become a costly substitute for deeper reform. The risk is not only that such measures fail to lift fertility significantly, but that they absorb fiscal and political attention Taiwan also needs for labor-market retention, eldercare capacity, productivity, and migration governance.

The reason is that low fertility is not only a financial problem. It is also a compatibility problem. For a younger adult who has spent years building education, income, mobility, and a sense of independence, parenthood may not look like one additional life stage, but like a renegotiation of the whole life they finally managed to build. 

These preferences are not fixed or purely individual; they are shaped by housing costs, work culture, family norms, gender expectations, and the perceived fairness of partnership. If marriage still implies heavier obligations for women — toward children, in-laws, and domestic coordination — then low fertility is not simply a failure of financial support. It is also a response to a family structure that has not fully adapted to women’s expanded options.

This is where fertility policy begins to overlap with labor policy. Taiwan’s problem is not simply that women cannot enter the labor market. Female labor-force participation has grown over time, and the gender gap has narrowed, but women’s participation still declines after age 30. Taiwan’s average age of first birth reached 31.5 in 2023, while its total fertility rate fell to 0.87. 

The timing does not prove that childbirth directly causes women to leave work, but it is suggestive: the decline begins around the same life stage when marriage, pregnancy, and first childbirth become more likely. That makes retention, not only entry, a central issue for fertility policy. The issue is not only whether women can get hired, but whether employers, families, and partners still treat women’s work as the most flexible part of the household once caregiving pressure appears.

Formal benefits also do not automatically erase informal expectations. Taiwan has improved parental-leave policy, and male take-up has increased, but women still account for most parental-leave allowance approvals. Meanwhile, workplace and family expectations can still pressure women to slow career development or take on most childcare and domestic duties; some employers have reportedly asked female candidates whether they intend to have children. These are precisely the kinds of signals that make motherhood look risky even when formal policy exists. A benefit may exist on paper, but if taking it marks someone as less committed, less promotable, or more “naturally” responsible for care, the policy’s practical effect becomes smaller than its legal design.

The role of government, then, should not be to seduce or guilt-trip women into having children. Moral appeals to motherhood are unlikely to work when women are weighing not only money, but autonomy, career continuity, and psychological space. A more realistic approach is to begin with women who may want children but are discouraged by the penalties attached to motherhood. If the labor market treats pregnancy, childbirth, and caregiving as career liabilities, then fertility policy cannot be separated from employment policy.

Maternal employment should therefore be understood as part of fertility policy, not as a separate labor issue. Paid leave, affordable childcare, protection against pregnancy discrimination, flexible work that does not quietly become a promotion penalty, and stronger incentives for fathers to share caregiving all shape whether parenthood feels compatible with adulthood. These measures will not change the minds of people who do not want children, nor should they try to. But they can reduce the fear that wanted motherhood will require women to retreat from work, identity, or independence.

A more realistic approach would operate on two tracks. The first is family and labor policy: reducing the penalties faced by people who want children, especially women. This means protecting maternal employment, expanding childcare that fits real working schedules, enforcing anti-discrimination rules, making flexible work compatible with promotion, and encouraging fathers to take on caregiving in practice rather than only in principle. These measures will not persuade everyone to have children, nor should they try to. Their purpose is narrower and more defensible: to make wanted parenthood less punitive.

The second track is demographic adaptation. Taiwan will need to plan for productivity, eldercare, technology, and migration as permanent parts of its demographic strategy, not emergency patches. Assuming very low fertility persists, Taiwan will also need a more serious migrant labor strategy, especially in caregiving. This cannot rely on informal goodwill or the assumption that households, brokers, employers, and migrant workers will simply “understand” one another. Care work happens inside homes, across language and cultural gaps, and under conditions where both trust and enforcement matter. 

A weak system can expose migrant workers to exploitation, but it can also expose families and elderly people to contract violations, sudden departures, neglect, theft, or care disruption. The answer is not to moralize either side, but to build a clearer system of rules, training, monitoring, dispute resolution, and enforceable responsibilities. Without that, Taiwan may solve one demographic pressure by creating another social and labor problem.

Taiwan’s challenge, then, is not simply to raise births, but to govern for a society in which low fertility may persist while making parenthood less punitive for those who still want it. The state cannot manufacture maternal desire, but it can stop making motherhood look like a punishment.

(This piece reflects the author's opinion, and does not represent the opinion of CommonWealth Magazine.)

CommonWealth Magazine welcomes op-ed submissions. Please send your article proposals to [email protected]

About the author:

Gita Gabriella holds an MSc in Innovation and Entrepreneurship Management from Antwerp Management School and is based in Taipei, working independently as a researcher and writer. She explores technology, policy, sustainability, and governance issues in East Asia.

Have you read?

• Aligned, But Not Equal: Gender Equality in Taiwan’s Green Transition
• The Empty Cradle: Why Cash Incentives Can’t Fix Taiwan’s Birth Rate
• Beyond Birth Rates: Fixing Taiwan’s Early Adulthood in the Age of AI

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