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Article ID: CBB000930701

“Let's Have the Proper Number of Children and Raise Them Well!”: Family Planning and Nation-Building in South Korea, 1961--1968 (2008)

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
Volume: 2
Pages: 361--379

Publication Date: 2008
Edition Details: Part of a special issue: Gender and Reproductive Technologies in East Asia
Language: English

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Public health Birth control; contraception; sterilization Family planning Social welfare Cold War Medicine and government Women and health 20th century, late Korea

This paper looks at the formation of a South Korean national health network by focusing on the introduction of an ambitious National Family Planning (FP) Program under President Park Chung Hee (1961--1968). The program, influenced in part by the model of its neighbor, Taiwan (Taichung), saw two pilot studies carried out in Koyang (rural, beginning in 1963) and Sundong-gu (Seoul metropolitan area, 1964--1966), before being carried to rural areas nationwide. If the program began with numerous echoes of Japanese colonial practice, it was mobilized specifically in terms of the emerging modern South Korean story and the state's relationship to the welfare of the individual family unit. Using a range of Korean and English-language sources, the paper illustrates how the FP effort took: (1) the Koyang study of the effects of mass communication in rural areas as a tentative blueprint for expanding its national agenda; (2) subsequently enlisted mobile transportation (1966) to expand the scope of its reach; and finally, mobilized Mothers' Clubs (1968) to penetrate the very fabric of rural society, making women both the target as well as the primary means of distribution. Ultimately, this strategy of enlisting the active participation of South Korean women on behalf of the program asked rural women in particular to submit their bodies to the state's scrutiny, even as they formed the core of the distribution network. In this respect, FP anticipated the mass mobilization of rural South Korea in the New Village movement of the 1970s and leaves behind an ambiguous legacy of state control that is only just beginning to be re-examined. Keywords Family planning - Birth control - IUD - Population - Biomedicine - South Korea - Cold war

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Article Clarke, Adele E. (2008) Introduction: Gender and Reproductive Technologies in East Asia. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (p. 303). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB000930701/

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