WUNRN
SOUTH KOREA - GROUP RESISTS STIGMA
FOR UNWED MOTHERS
Mok
Kyong-wha, with her son, said that she broke up with her boyfriend while she
was pregnant and refused when he asked her to have an abortion.
Jean Chung for the
International Herald Tribune
October
7, 2009
SEOUL,
South
Korea — Four years ago, when she found that she was pregnant by her
former boyfriend, Choi Hyong-sook considered abortion. But after she saw the
little blip of her baby’s heartbeat on ultrasound images, she could not go
through with it.
As
her pregnancy advanced, she confided in her elder brother. His reaction would
sound familiar to unwed mothers in South Korea. She said he tried to drag her
to an abortion clinic. Later, she said, he pressed her to give the child up for
adoption.
“My
brother said: ‘How can you be so selfish? You can’t do this to our
parents,’ ” said Ms. Choi, 37, a hairdresser in Seoul. “But when the
adoption agency took my baby away, I felt as if I had thrown him into the
trash. It felt as if the earth had stopped turning. I persuaded them to let me
reclaim my baby after five days.”
Now,
Ms. Choi and other women in her situation are trying to set up the country’s
first unwed mothers association to defend their right to raise their own
children. It is a small but unusual first step in a society that ostracizes
unmarried mothers to such an extent that Koreans often describe things as
outrageous by comparing them to “an unmarried woman seeking an excuse to give
birth.”
The
fledgling group of women — only 40 are involved so far — is striking at one of
the great ironies of South Korea. The government and commentators fret over the
country’s birthrate, one of the world’s lowest, and deplore South Korea’s
international reputation as a baby exporter for foreign adoptions.
Yet
each year, social pressure drives thousands of unmarried women to choose
between abortion, which is illegal but rampant, and adoption, which is
considered socially shameful but is encouraged by the government. The few women
who decide to raise a child alone risk a life of poverty and disgrace.
Nearly
90 percent of the 1,250 South Korean children adopted abroad last year, most of
them by American couples, were born to unmarried women, according to the
Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs.
In
their campaign, Ms. Choi and the other women have attracted unusual allies.
Korean-born adoptees and their foreign families have been returning here in
recent years to speak out for the women, who face the same difficulties in
today’s South Korea as the adoptees’ birth mothers did decades ago.
One
such supporter, Richard Boas, an ophthalmologist from Connecticut who adopted a
Korean girl in 1988, said he was helping other Americans adopt foreign children
when he visited a social service agency in South Korea in 2006 and began
rethinking his “rescue and savior mentality.” There, he encountered a roomful
of pregnant women, all unmarried and around 20 years old.
“I
looked around and asked myself why these mothers were all giving up their
kids,” Dr. Boas said.
He
started the Korean
Unwed Mothers Support Network, which advocates for better welfare
services from the state.
“What
we see in South Korea today is discrimination against natural mothers and
favoring of adoption at the government level,” said Jane Jeong Trenka, 37, a
Korean-born adoptee who grew up in Minnesota and now leads Truth
and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea, one of two
groups organized by Korean adoptees who have returned to their homeland to
advocate for the rights of adoptees and unwed mothers. “Culture is not an
excuse to abuse human rights.”
In
2007, 7,774 babies were born out of wedlock in South Korea, 1.6 percent of all
births. (In the United States, nearly 40 percent of babies born in 2007 had unmarried
mothers, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.) Nearly 96
percent of unwed pregnant women in South Korea choose abortion, according to
the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs.
Of
unmarried women who give birth, about 70 percent are believed to give up their
babies for adoption, according to a government-financed survey. In the United
States, the figure is 1 percent, the Health and Human Services Department reports.
For
years, the South Korean government has worked to reduce overseas adoptions,
which peaked at 8,837 in 1985. To increase adoptions at home, it provides
subsidies and extra health care benefits for families that adopt, and it
designated May 11 as Adoption Day.
It
also spends billions of dollars a year to try to reverse the declining
birthrate, subsidizing fertility treatments for married couples, for example.
“But
we don’t see a campaign for unmarried mothers to raise our own children,” said
Lee Mee-kyong, a 33-year-old unwed mother. “Once you become an unwed mom,
you’re branded as immoral and a failure. People treat you as if you had
committed a crime. You fall to the bottom rung of society.”
The
government pays a monthly allowance of $85 per child to those who adopt
children. It offers half that for single mothers of dependent children.
The
government is trying to increase payments to help unwed mothers and to add more
facilities to provide care for unmarried pregnant women, said Baek Su-hyun, an
official at the Health Ministry. But the social stigma discourages women from
coming forward.
Chang
Ji-young, 27, who gave birth to a boy last month, said: “My former boyfriend’s
sister screamed at me over the phone demanding that I get an abortion. His
mother and sister said it was up to them to decide what to do with my baby
because it was their family’s seed.”
Families
whose unmarried daughters become pregnant sometimes move to conceal the
pregnancy. Unwed mothers often lie about their marital status for fear they
will be evicted by landlords and their children ostracized at school. Only
about a quarter of South Koreans are willing to have a close relationship with
an unwed mother as a coworker or neighbor, according to a recent survey by the
government-financed Korean Women’s Development Institute.
“I
was turned down eight times in job applications,” Ms. Lee said. “Each time a
company learned that I was an unwed mom, it accused me of dishonesty.”
Ms.
Choi, the hairdresser, said her family changed its phone number to avoid
contact with her. When her father was hospitalized and she went to see him with
her baby, she said, her sister blocked them from entering his room. When she
wrote to him, she said, her father burned the letters. Last year, about three
years after the birth, he finally accepted Ms. Choi back into his home.
“That
day, I saw him in the bathroom, crying over one of my letters,” she said. “I
realized how hard it must have been for him as well.”
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