Birth control has become an important issue for woman’s rights as well as the environment. However, a survey of South Korean women age 19-34 found 45% believe contraception should be a man’s responsibility.
The survey, by the Study Group for Contraception, shows that most women are doing little or nothing to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Of the 1000 women who participated in the survey, one in five said she relied on coitus interruptus or timing pregnancy cycles as a form of birth control. Both methods have high failure rates of around 25%.

What’s more, abortion is illegal in South Korea, except under extenuating circumstances. The result is an almost entirely first-world country where each year hundreds of thousands of women practice illegal abortions at “don’t ask don’t tell” clinics.

In 2005, the government admitted that more than 340,000 illegal abortions had been carried out, while the number of child births for that year was around 476,000. These numbers suggest that one out of every 32 fertile women in South Korea is forced into having an illegal abortion.

Only 4.8% in the survey felt birth control was a woman’s responsibility.
However, not surprisingly, women may not be to blame for their lack of involvement in reproductive rights. The attitude can also be seen as a carry-over from the country’s male-dominated Confucian culture, which exerts significant control over female sexuality. While Korean men are generally expected to gain sexual experience before marriage, women are simply expected to practice abstinence until marriage. Those who don’t have little chance to talk openly about sex.

The “don’t ask don’t tell” policy of abortion clinics reflects a general attitude that shuns sexually active women. At the same time, this “open secrecy” enables a greater number of illicit sexual encounters for men. Just as illegal abortion clinics operate in the open, illegal brothels are also easily recognized by red lights, tinted windows, and sometimes even buskers.

Women in the Western culture may see this as an unfair double standard. One foreign woman I talked with told me that when she tried to gain access to birth control pills, which are available without prescription at the pharmacy, she was told, “only certain kinds of women take those pills.” Attitudes like these are changing, especially in metropolitan areas, but in South Korea they are still the norm.