For Eugenic Reasons: Marriage and Limiting Births in Postwar South Korea

The history of family planning in South Korea often begins in 1961, shortly after the military leader Park Chung Hee came to power through a coup d'état in the same year. In this understanding, not only does the history of family planning begin in 1961, especially through the establishment of the Planned Parenthood Federation of Korea (PPFK) but is also dominated by Park and the male medico-technocrats who occupied PPFK’s leadership. In reality, diverse interests and debates on family planning existed well before 1961. This paper seeks to contextualize the history of family planning in South Korea before it became a state-led project and shed light on Korean women’s participation in discussions of on the issue. Alongside elite men, women of various backgrounds – housewives, teachers, doctors, and actresses – offered their opinions in newspapers and women’s magazines that targeted middle- and upper-class women and families. Like elite men, many women, often problematically, turned to the language of eugenics in order to position themselves as progressive thinkers and rational choice-makers in their gender and familial relations. Accusing others of displaying “animalistic behavior” – that is, having too many babies – betrayed their own class positions, while simultaneously quietly tolerating the reality that many elite men and women already had “too many babies” themselves in this rapidly changing environment. In the post-Korean War, pronatalist climate, where the quantity of babies was interpreted as national strength, utilizing eugenic science enabled many Korean women to advocate for certain marital and reproductive choices and practices without appearing to challenge the male-centric nation’s position.