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To curb the explosive population growth caused by medical advances and the postwar baby boom, the South Korean government actively pursued a population control policy starting in the 1960s. The government gave incentives to families with fewer children, such as giving tax breaks to couples with three or fewer children and prioritizing two-child families for public housing. It also actively encouraged women of childbearing age to use temporary or permanent contraception and even sterilization. The government also put effort into creating a social atmosphere that favored fewer children through media, like posters and slogans. The infographic below captures the total fertility rate and population growth trends in South Korea over time, as well as the government’s population policy keynotes, posters, and slogans of the times. The posters introduced below illustrate the South Korean government’s fertility policy, which changed dramatically per decade. In 1960, during the aftermath of the war, the popular saying was: “Don’t have too many and suffer, have a few and thrive.” The Korean government also sponsored the “3.3.35” exercise, which recommended that families have three children in threeyear gaps and no children after the mother becomes 35. In 1970, the slogan became “Don’t separate girls and boys, just have two and raise them well.” During this time, the South Korean government focused on promoting the image of a family of four—a couple with one son and one daughter—as the “normal” family. In the 1980s, the slogans became more explicit and blatant: “Two is still too much” and “From three on, it is embarrassing.” Prenatal ultrasounds were widely recommended, and obstetricians often openly mentioned abortion if the fetus had a disability. Consequentially, the Korean government’s population control achieved huge success: in the 1960s, the average number of births expected in one Korean woman was six children; it plummeted to 1.5 in the 1990s.
South Korea’s Population Policy Keynotes, Posters, and Slogans Through the Decades.
Black Graph Indicates Total Fertility Rates, Red Graph Indicates Total Population. Kyunghyang.
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 portrays the change in Korean family through Oh Misook— presumably born in the 1950s or 60s and gave birth to her children in the 80s—as the following:
Traditionally an agricultural society, Korea was industrializing fast, and [Oh’s] family couldn’t get on by crops alone. Her father sent his children to the cities like most parents from rural areas did in those days. But he didn’t have the means to support all five of them through school or training that would lead to their respective career choices. In the city, rent and living costs were expensive, and tuition was even more difficult to afford. (Cho 24)
Like Oh Misook’s family, many families in postwar South Korea could not “afford” to have all their children continue education. Some children were less affordable than others; daughters were considered less worthy of investment than sons. Many impoverished families implemented choice and concentration strategies—parents funneled most of their resources to their sons, especially the eldest, while daughters were married off early or worked in factories after only completing elementary school.
Even when people had many children, daughters were seen as liabilities; after the Korean government imposed economic disadvantages for having many children, merely giving birth to girls became a luxury. In the 1960s, many families tended to continue having children until they had a boy to carry on the family name, and birth control and family planning had yet to take hold in Korean society. Therefore, Korean women still gave birth to an average of six to seven children, as seen in the Kyunghyang infographic. From the 1970s to the early 1990s, under the aggressive government population policies, many South Korean parents “decided” not to have “too many” girls. As shown in the graph below, from the 1970s to the 2000s, the sex ratio at birth—the number of male births per 100 female births—of the first child did not change much, while the sex ratio of the third and fourth children surged dramatically, reaching as high as 250. Experts interpret this result as sex-selective abortion on a national scale (Park Chai Bin and Cho Nam-Hoon). In the 1980s and 1990s, they chose to take a shortcut by aborting “surplus” female babies when they came as the third or fourth child. As a result, the overall sex ratio at birth in South Korea surged to 115 in the 1990s. The mass abortion—fetal femicide or female foeticide— was the worst in 1990, the Year of the White Horse, because of the superstition that says “girls born in the Year of the White Horse have an unfortunate destiny.”
Like Jiyoung’s unborn younger sister, aborted girls in this period were victims of a collaborated violence of the ingrained Korean gender preference for male children and the government’s “modern” need to push population control at any cost. As Yang Hyuna interprets in From Criminality of Abortion to Reproductive Rights, “the high rate of abortion during this period is not evidence that Korean women were living up to their right to self-determination, but rather an indicator of their lack of control over their own lives” (132). Mothers who “voluntarily” decided to abort their daughters were also victims: even though difficult economic circumstances and pressure from other family members who wanted a son were the main reasons women decided to have an unwanted abortion, if it became known that one had an abortion, it was the mother who took the sole emotional, physical, and legal responsibility. According to “South Korea Rules Anti-Abortion Law Unconstitutional” from The New York Times, under the previous South Korean criminal code, “a woman who undergoes an abortion [could] be punished with up to a year in prison or a fine of up to 2 million won, about $1,750,” and “a doctor who performs an abortion [faced] up to two years in prison.” Since South Korea’s abortion law was ruled unconstitutional in 2019, there are no criminal grounds to punish individuals based on abortion in South Korea as of now.
Discussion Questions:
Based on these data, how would you interpret the events of pp 17-19?
What does it mean that “the ratio for the third child and beyond was over twoto-one” (Cho 19)?
How do the trends in South Korea compare to the sex ratio at birth statistics of other Asian countries, like India and China? What are the similarities between these countries? Why do you think this trend continues today in South Korea?
What social pressures and economic challenges influenced Oh Misook’s “decision” to end her third pregnancy?
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