“Limiting Birth”: Birth Control in Colonial Korea

“[Here] we examine birth control as practice and discourse in 1920s and 1930s Korea under Japanese colonial rule and explores links with family planning and reproductive practices in post-1945 South Korea. The control of women’s reproduction held critical implications for meanings of domesticity, marriage, sexual relations, and new womanhood. While a woman-centered position did emerge regarding birth control, the parameters of the discourse, concerns of gynecology, and the material culture of birth control ultimately tied the bodies and health of women to their biological and social roles as mothers […].

What we observe then is that in this Korean colonial context, a “maternalist agenda”which prioritized women’s social and political contributions through their biological and social roles as mothers defined the parameters of the discussion. Subordinating women’s identity, desires, and behavior to the demands of family and nation meant that their sexuality was to be dominated by their biological sexual function.

As a literary figure opined in 1925, women are producers and architects of the Korean nation as they are producers of humans; they are, in fact, mothers of the nation. One could argue that there was an element in the birth control discourse that separated sexuality from reproduction, in that physicians acknowledged sex as natural and pleasurable and that individuals with suspect genetic traits were to refrain only from having children, not from having sex. But sex was strictly restricted to the conjugal unit, at least for women. Female sexuality itself was not recognized.

In a round table discussion of gynecologists in 1933, female sexual pleasure was discussed only in terms of it affecting her ability to conceive. The first question asked was whether it was possible to determine medically whether one was a virgin or not.

The physicians recounted with dismay patients with uterine pain or damage from men and who had little recourse for compensation for the loss of their innocence. In this context, birth control in Korea contributed to the construction of a womanhood that restricted women to their biological and social functions as mothers and viewed reproduction as meeting the needs of family, society, and the nation.

Women’s bodies were to function in this reproductive role, and failure to do so was tragic (in the case of infertility) or abominable (in the case of choice). Aside from eugenic concerns, limiting birth was not about avoiding pregnancy per se; it was about applying modern techniques and medical knowledge to the female body to create a new bourgeois ideal of a nuclear family with two or three children.

As one writer Pae Songnyong stated, “Limiting birth is the avoidance of conception by women themselves through technological means.””

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“Limiting Birth”: Birth Control in Colonial Korea (1910–1945) by Sonja Kim