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The number of women in their prime childbearing years between 25 and 39 in Seoul has dropped by 234,000 over the last two decades, the Seoul Metropolitan Government said Thursday citing the latest census report by Statistics Korea.

The proportion of women in their prime childbearing years in the total female population declined from 29.2 percent to 26.7 percent over the same period.

In 1990, females between 0 and 24 years of age accounted for 44.8 percent of the total population, but that fell to 26.5 percent in 2010.

But the number of single women has increased massively. In 1990, 14.7 percent of women in their prime childbearing years in Seoul, or 227,000, were single, but in 2010 that had risen to 48.3 percent or 632,000 out of 1.38 million women. That marks a three-fold increase over the last 20 years.

Meanwhile, married women in their prime childbearing years gave birth to only 1.4 children on average in 2010, down from 2.2 in 1980. As a result, the proportion of families with one child (41.2 percent) out of the total number of families exceeded the proportion of families with two children (40.6 percent) for the first time.

Also, 65.3 percent of those married women had no plans to have more children.

These developments have translated into a marked decline in new births. The number of newborns, which stood at 1.83 million in 1992, almost halved to 910,000 in 2011.

Park Young-sup at the Seoul city government said, “More and more women are no longer considering it vital to have children after marriage because they have higher educational qualifications and jobs”.