On Dec. 9, Sungshin Women’s University in Seoul organised an event titled, ‘Happy Childbirth – Rich and Strong Future’, aimed at trying to raise awareness about the country’s very low birth rate.

At the Dec. 3 public forum Eunsang Lee (extreme left) said there is no link between the country's low birth rate and high abortion rate. Credit: Office of parliamentarian Il-pyo Hong

It sparked controversy when the organisers requested women students in the audience to submit a sworn statement that they would have children.

A fourth year student who prefers to remain anonymous, told IPS “the organisers almost forced female participants to write a sworn statement for childbirth despite many participants asserting that the low birth issue is a social problem rather than mere individual choice.”

South Korea’s birth rate – 1.19 in 2008, according to the Korean Statistical Information Service, is the lowest among OECD countries – has been in the news recently.

In November, the government’s Presidential Council for Future & Vision announced “comprehensive plans for low birth rate.”

The plans include a crackdown on abortion.

Women’s groups have expressed strong reservations. “This plan illustrates the anti-human rights stance of the government which portrays women as an instrument for child birth rather than human beings with reproductive rights,” groups said in a joint statement issued on Nov.26.

The government’s position echoes a recently launched anti-abortion campaign by a group of obstetricians and gynecologists.

Abortion is illegal in South Korea except in cases specified under the Mother-Child Protection Law. However, the reality according to a 2005 survey conducted by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Family Affairs is that there are some 340,000 abortions annually across the country. The actual numbers are likely to be much higher.

At an open forum on Dec. 3, ‘Should we let abortion be – an inconvenient truth as it is’ organised by parliamentarian Il-pyo Hong, Eunsang Lee, director of the Korea Sexual Violence Relief Centre, observed that there is no link between the country’s low birth rate and high abortion rate.

Describing the former as a “social problem”, she said: “The government’s approach of linking low birth rate to abortion is highly problematic since it plans to solve a social problem through state intervention and control over women’s bodies.”

It is not the first time that women’s reproductive rights have been considered marginal in political discussions on South Korea’s birth rate.

Even the current President Myung-bak Lee had remarked during his presidential election campaign in 2007, “If women do not abort, we (Korea) can solve the problem of low birth rate.”

But if you were to ask women, specially married working women, for a solution to the serious birth rate problem they would advocate that the workplace should be transformed into a more women friendly domain.

Hayeon Cheon, who said she has been married for two years and is currently looking for work, was angered by the government’s simplistic solution to the birth rate problem. Based on her personal experience, she told IPS that the “low birth rate is fundamentally caused by the hostile working environment for married woman. In Korea, it is not easy for a woman to work once she delivers a child.”

She added: “Nowadays 90 percent of female high school students go to university and many with access to good education want to pursue a career, but it is very difficult for married women to take maternity leave and continue to work as the labour market and workplace conditions are not favourable.”

Unless the problem of married women in the labour market is solved, she said, “the phenomenon of low birth rate will continue unhindered.”

In South Korea, discussions on women’s reproductive rights have not been either very public or open. The issue should not be the low birth rate and abortion, but “how women’s reproductive rights including abortion rights can be guaranteed in a reasonable way,” said Eunsang Lee.

By Jiyoung LeeAn
SEOUL, Apr 20 2009 (IPS)

As an activist in China, Yuan Feng actively advocates women’s rights. Yuan is now the director of Combating Domestic Violence against Women and a leading figure of Gender and Development (GAD) group in China. She visited South Korea to join a newly established feminist network, Network for GloCal Activism and School of Feminism. Excerpts from the interview.

Yuan Feng: "The 1995 (Beijing) conference was a great turning point" Credit: Jiyoung LeeAn/IPS

IPS: It is not very usual for Chinese activists to define themselves as independent activists. Are there any particular reasons why you call yourself an independent activist? Yuan Feng: Actually becoming an independent activist was one of my dreams. In the past, I thought it would be impossible, but now I feel happy because I can say that I am an independent activist. I currently do not belong to any organisation, but I am working individually as an activist. I think this question is very meaningful in China’s context because, as you mentioned, there are very few people who define themselves as independent activist, but slowly the number of people like me is increasing.

IPS: Can you explain in more detail? YF: After the Chinese Communist Party came into power in 1949, every individual was recognised only as one of the many cogs forming the party-state machinery. It means that everybody should be a member of a particular unit. And of course, there is lack of gender perspective and sensitivity within the organisations. After ‘Reform and Opening’ in China, the concept of individual started to appear slowly. This is the social background which went into the making of an independent activist in China.

I worked for People’s Daily and China Women’s News for 20 years during which I felt that I was a cog in the party-state machinery but at the same I tried to be an independent thinking journalist. Gradually I found that one cannot be critical if she lacks gender sensitivity. I wanted to maintain objectivity as a journalist, and clearly demonstrate how general news is gendered. With other likeminded people, we established Chinese Women Media Monitor Network to screen Chinese news for gender sensitivity in 1996.

Apart from that, I was active in the formation of groups and networks for gender and development, and Combating Domestic Violence against Women. After all these processes, now I became an independent activist. But sometimes this ‘freedom’ allows me no freedom. Working as a freelance activist without being attached to any particular organisation sometimes brings about political inconvenience on many occasions in China.

IPS: The Fourth UN World Conference on Women in Beijing is considered a milestone for international women’s movement. Would you elaborate on what kind of impacts it had on women’s movement within China? YF: If at all, we can say, that there existed women’s movement in China before 1995, I think the 1995 conference was a great turning point. Especially after Tiananmen Square Massacre, people’s organisation in China had massively shrunk and hence only governmental organisations were active before 1995. The 1995 conference provided the basic ground for Chinese people to understand NGOs.

But I must also tell you that the meaning of NGOs in China is not necessarily anti-government. Nonetheless, through this conference, women in China started to have global perspectives and through studies started to understand the situation of women in other countries as well.

IPS: What made you join the newly established network called Network for GloCal Activism (NGA) and School of Feminism (SF)? YF: Most organisations in China are still confined to their own specific issues and are not actively engaging with other sectors. For example, AIDS related NGOs number in thousands, but there are less than 10 organisations which deal with AIDS focusing on women, even though the number of women infected with HIV is about one third of total infected people.

Considering this segmentation and lack of gender sensitivity in China, I think we need to have a new type of network to bridge different issues. At the same time I do not see these problems as China specific. As a process, first we should recognise our own local problems, and then we discuss them at a global level and find commonalities. Most of all, to build a democratic country, we need to resist current patriarchal authoritarianism, capitalism, militarism, imperialism, and fundamentalism. For NGOs, having critical and political perspective on these are very important. Through these processes, we can also establish a new theory to explain our actions. These are the uniqueness of NGA and SF.

IPS: Today China is seen as an emerging hegemonic power in Asia. Within that context why do you think that it is important for Chinese women’s movement to be part of networks like NGA and SF? YF: China is a huge country of 1.3 billion populations and composed of 56 ethnicities, but China is usually represented only as “Han ethnicity” and “Beijing”. We need to deconstruct this centrality of Han ethnicity and Beijing-oriented perspective about China. I think one of the ways to deconstruct hegemony and centrality is to connect locals to locals, not based on the concept of nation state. This is why we are forming this new NGA network.

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