A few months later, she missed her period. The next thing she knew, she was in a doctor’s office, having an abortion. When the 10-minute procedure ended, she was wracked by anxiety. The man who promised her his heart abandoned her because of the abortion. She never told her family for fear that her shame would become theirs. She worried that university counselors would eject her from school if they knew of the procedure. Girlfriends would have disowned her. Three years later, she’s married to another man and pregnant with a child she longs to have. But the secret of the abortion lingers inside. “I can’t tell my husband,” she says (she asked NEWSWEEK to withhold her identity). “If he knew the truth he’d probably divorce me.”
Even in the West, having an abortion is a traumatic experience. Korean women not only have to deal with a far greater degree of cultural stigma, but the procedure is technically illegal. (Abortions are allowed only in cases of rape, disfigurement of the child or threat to the mother’s health.) Yet government officials estimate that between 1.5 million and 2 million abortions are performed in South Korea each year–roughly the same number as in the United States, a country with six times the female population. For every child born in Korea, roughly three are aborted–one of the highest rates in the world. The numbers are shocking testimony to the unsettled sexual landscape in Korea, where mores are shifting too quickly for the system to catch up. “We are seeing a clash of values in Korean society,” says Han Sang-soon, director of Aeranwon, a shelter for unwed mothers. “Abortion is the result.”
Before the 1950s, conservative social attitudes led to few abortions being performed in the Confucian country. But in the 1960s, as citizens were urged to have fewer children in the name of national development, the procedure became accepted as a means of family planning. Most patients were married women who did not want to have more children; between 1966 and 1973, the birthrate fell from 35.6 to 28.8 kids per 1,000 people. Then in 1973, just as Roe v. Wade legalized a woman’s right to choose in the United States, a conservative backlash in Korea led the government to ban the procedure. The clock, however, could not be turned back. Thousands of doctors continued to perform abortions openly in clinics, causing the birthrate to decline even further, to 15.6 per 1,000 in 1990.
Flouting the law is remarkably easy. Since some abortions are legal, gynecologists must be trained and have all the necessary equipment to perform the procedure. The government, embarrassed by the high number of Korean children put up for adoption overseas, is thought to be reluctant to crack down. Doctors, who make between $80 and $300 per first-trimester abortion, similarly have incentives to fudge matters. If questioned, they can argue that having the child would impair the mother’s “mental health.” For young women, asking for an abortion is as easy as walking into a doctor’s office. The high rate of abortions, says an official at the Planned Parenthood Federation of Korea, “is our greatest shame.”
The trend is fueled by loosening sexual mores. Nowadays, instead of married women who cannot afford another child, most patients are young women who want to avoid the shame of being unwed mothers. Until the mid-1990s, it was not uncommon for a couple walking the streets of Seoul to be berated for holding hands in public. Now Korean culture at large has become much more open about sex. One of the top box-office draws at Korean theaters last year was “Yellow Hair,” a tale of the sexual adventures of two women and a man. “Downfall,” the story of a Korean prostitute, was shown to packed theaters in 1997. The Internet explosion–in a country with one of the highest rates of broadband usage in the world–has opened a whole new world of sexual imagery to Korean youth. Kids playing wildly popular online strategy games are inundated with pornography advertisements. “When it comes to sex,” says Aeranwon’s Han, “the children are running and the parents are crawling.”
Yet what Korea’s unusually high abortion rate may really be demonstrating is the persistence of conservative attitudes. A great many unwanted pregnancies can be attributed to a lack of education about safe sex. Many Korean parents don’t discuss the subject with their daughters, assuming that they will remain virgins until marriage. While the government has developed a high-school sex-education program that is more modern in scope, many conservative administrators simply refuse to teach the material. “Usually the schools only teach the difference between men and women and give a basic idea of biological structures,” says Kim Soung-yee, a professor of social work at Ewha University in Seoul. Two years ago, the government’s censor board banned an MTV show promoting AIDS awareness because it mentioned the word “condom” too frequently; a condom manufacturer was prevented from airing its ads at the same time. The Roman Catholic Church, a powerful lobby in Korea, insists that such actions make sense. Mentioning contraception “will just encourage more free sex,” says the Rev. Paul Lee of Korea’s Catholic Bishops’ Conference.
Once pregnant, women face an uncomfortable reality: The stigma of unwed motherhood is greater than that of having an abortion. Students are often forced to drop out of school. Working women can find their careers jeopardized. “There’s a kind of environmental pressure,” says Ewha University’s Kim. “They think if they got pregnant they are shamed, so they leave the office.” Abortions, too, are not openly acknowledged. But the procedure at least allows society to wash its hands of the problem of unwanted pregnancies. That helps explain why despite vehement opposition from both the church and the Korean Medical Association, the government recently approved Norlevo, the “morning-after” pill, in Korea.
Nothing will solve the larger problem, however, except greater education–something that remains depressingly far off. One gynecologist with more than 10 years of experience performing dozens of illegal abortions told NEWSWEEK: “Every time I do it, I have doubts. The first thing I think about is my children.” Yet when asked how she teaches her teenagers about sex, the doctor says, “I always want to talk, but it’s very difficult for me. We feel embarrassed about it.” Until that stigma is removed, no magic pill will erase Korea’s shame.
