Korea's Dark Secret.(abortion)

They first met at the Christian Club when she was at university in Seoul. He was an architecture major, 26 years old like her, tall, clean-cut. They began dating, and after a year they had sex. She enjoyed it partly for the physical pleasure, but mostly because of the deep devotion she felt for him. They had mapped their future together-- marriage, a family--all the things young Koreans are meant to desire.

A few months later, she missed her period. The next thing she knew, she was in a doctor's office, having an abortion. When the 10-minute procedure ended, she was wracked by anxiety. The man who promised her his heart abandoned her because of the abortion. She never told her family for fear that her shame would become theirs. She worried that university counselors would eject her from school if they knew of the procedure. Girlfriends would have disowned her. Three years later, she's married to another man and pregnant with a child she longs to have. But the secret of the abortion lingers inside. "I can't tell my husband," she says (she asked NEWSWEEK to withhold her identity). "If he knew the truth he'd probably divorce me."

Even in the West, having an abortion is a traumatic experience. Korean women not only have to deal with a far greater degree of cultural stigma, but the procedure is technically illegal. (Abortions are allowed only in cases of rape, disfigurement of the child or threat to the mother's health.) Yet government officials estimate that between 1.5 million and 2 million abortions are performed in South Korea each year--roughly the same number as in the United States, a country with six times the female population. For every child born in Korea, roughly three are aborted--one of the highest rates in the world. The numbers are shocking testimony to the unsettled sexual landscape in Korea, where mores are shifting too quickly for the system to catch up. "We are seeing a clash of values in Korean society," says Han Sang-soon, director of Aeranwon, a shelter for unwed mothers. "Abortion is the result."

Before the 1950s, conservative social attitudes led to few abortions being performed in the Confucian country. But in the 1960s, as citizens were urged to have fewer children in the name of national development, the procedure became accepted as a means of family planning. Most patients were married women who did not want to have more children; between 1966 and 1973, the birthrate fell from 35.6 to 28.8 kids per 1,000 people. Then in 1973, just as Roe v. Wade legalized a woman's right to choose in the United States, a conservative backlash in Korea led the government to ban the procedure. The clock, however, could not be turned back. Thousands of doctors continued to perform abortions openly in clinics, causing the birthrate to decline even further, to 15.6 per 1,000 in 1990.

Flouting the law is remarkably easy. Since some abortions are legal, gynecologists must be trained and have all the necessary equipment to perform the procedure. The government, embarrassed by the high number of Korean children put up for adoption overseas, is thought to be reluctant to crack down. Doctors, who make between $80 and $300 per first-trimester abortion, similarly have incentives to fudge matters. If questioned, they can argue that having the child would impair the mother's "mental health." For young women, asking for an abortion is as easy as walking into a doctor's office. The high rate of abortions, ...