Forced abortions in developing South Korea?

South Korea, with its ultra-low fertility rate (well below replacement level) and its lingering gender imbalance, was once a high-fertility society where families would routinely have four, five, six, even seven or more kids, often continuing to produce new children until they produced a male heir.

When the government put in place family planning — contraception information and contraceptive devices, sterilization, and widespread abortion — it took hold with a vengeance.

Part of this is addressed in a Foreign Policy piece that asks why 160 million girls are missing from East Asia. Here is the section that deals with South Korea specifically:

In South Korea, Western money enabled the creation of a fleet of mobile clinics -- reconditioned U.S. Army ambulances donated by USAID and staffed by poorly trained workers and volunteers. Fieldworkers employed by the health ministry's Bureau of Public Health were paid based on how many people they brought in for sterilizations and intrauterine device insertions, and some allege Korea's mobile clinics later became the site of abortions as well. By the 1970s, recalls gynecologist Cho Young-youl, who was a medical student at the time, "there were agents going around the countryside to small towns and bringing women into the [mobile] clinics. That counted toward their pay. They brought the women regardless of whether they were pregnant." Non-pregnant women were sterilized. A pregnant woman met a worse fate, Cho says: "The agent would have her abort and then undergo tubal ligation." As Korea's abortion rate skyrocketed, Sung-bong Hong and Christopher Tietze detailed its rise in the Population Council journal Studies in Family Planning. By 1977, they determined, doctors in Seoul were performing 2.75 abortions for every birth -- the highest documented abortion rate in human history. Were it not for this history, Korean sociologist Heeran Chun recently told me, "I don't think sex-selective abortion would have become so popular."

I wonder how accurate this characterization is. That is, this description makes it sound like sterilizations were coerced and abortions were forced, criticisms that in the 1980s and beyond would be leveled at Mainland China and their One Child Policy, and one wonders if it was generally true, true in some areas, or rarely the case at all.

On the other hand, the astronomical prevalence of abortion, from what I've heard, well-known and documented. But I have no first-hand knowledge or insight into cases prior to the 1990s (I knew several ob/gyns and medical students who discussed such matters, though often in vague terms) to know if these were anything other than the voluntary abortions that have been the norm in the 1990s and 2000s.

ROK females overtake males in university admissions; a bad sign for South Korean fertility

According to the Korea Times, 82.4% of females now enter four-year schools versus 81.6% of males:

Many women are prioritizing their career over raising a family. They even outpace their male counterparts in some professional fields, emerging as an essential part of the nation's highly-educated and sophisticated labor force.

Reflecting women's growing role in Korean society, a larger portion of female high school students went on to universities than their male counterparts last year for the first time in history, Statistics Korea said Sunday.

It said 82.4 percent of female high-school students entered universities in 2010, higher than the 81.6 percent for males. It was the first time the ratio was in the females' favor since the statistical office began compiling data.

In 1990, only 32.4 percent of young women moved on to university, but the ratio has continued on an upward curve over the past two decades, reaching as high as 83.5 percent in 2008.

There is one glaring problem there that a lot of policy makers don't address: Why do we make it so advantageous for (financially and socially) for people— male or female — to go to four-year schools (or at least, we make it so ostracizing if they don't)?

Going to a four-year university instead of a two-year college requires, on average, more than the two years' difference because of lost time spent trying to get into the four-year school (which causes delays of one or two or more years for many students). And that doesn't include the parents' wages spent on getting an edge on the entrance exam.

All this leads to downward pressures on fertility, for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that it makes raising second or later children prohibitively expensive, such that many families opt for just one (and this causes the cycle to repeat itself, because then they feel a need to invest everything in that one child getting into a top-ranked school).

But this worship of four-year schools also leads to later ages for graduation, which cuts into prime fertility ages. Despite the best planning of families to the contrary, when women get married earlier, they are in a position to have more babies; this is simple demographic math. This doesn't mean we should have people get hitched at eighteen, but when you have people getting married at thirty-one instead of twenty-eight, or twenty-nine instead of twenty-six, they produce less children, whether that's the plan or not.

The government should look for ways to encourage the hiring of two-year college graduates with good pay in meaningful work — and let's face it, they often know more about real work than their four-year counterparts — while at the same time not taking away too many opportunities for today's crop of four-year graduates. Right now, the average wage-seeker has it all backwards if you're trying to encourage a higher birth rate: when they can't find good jobs they seek more education, not less.

At the same time, we might want to find ways to boost military manpower with more career soldiers so that the mandatory conscription system can eventually be eliminated. The two-year stint (eventually to be eighteen months) forces people to put life plans on hold in a way that is detrimental to efforts to produce larger families. Furthermore, career soldiers can get married and have kids, unlike their conscripted counterparts.

It's time to think out of the box.

Japan's dangerously fertility rate, in a nutshell

Though an extreme case, this represents a trend that has demographers, sociologists, economists, and government wonks quite perplexed.

Link here. Shell of a nut, indeed.

And my apologies for merely sending links, but that's the best I can do when my only access to the Interwebs is my iPhone, with which Blogspot doesn't seem to play nice.