[AstralStorm]

Said sacrifices were made by a whole lot of servants, not wives if they could help it. (Almost slaves.) Even poorest used to have help, and parents on hand to help with raising the kids too.

And in Korea in particular, the villages were partly communal. Cities are hyper individualistic. People who moved to cities do not have access to their parents or other villagers for help.

State cannot fully cover this problem without extra manpower or even more advanced tech solutions that do not exist. Especially when people who have the most problem are the poorest.

Putting it onto one woman is extremely miserable and unfair. Changing the structure of a society to not have this problem is hard too. Money cannot patch a problem of massive lack of manpower and said manpower being expensive. Not quickly and not cheaply, anyway.

[midoridensha]

Well we can't go back to living in villages unless we want to regress to a Medieval standard of living or worse. People have been living in cities for many centuries; remember Rome? And there's nothing forcing peoples' parents from living in cities, and in many older cities you'll see plenty of elderly people, since it's the best place for them to live since it has easy access to medical care.