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The Korea Herald
Low birthrate may hurt growth potential
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Korea`s potential economic growth could plunge below 1 percent in 2040 as the nation quickly turns into an aged society with an extremely low birth rate, Kim Dong-suk, a researcher at the state-run Korea Development Institute, said yesterday.
In a symposium on Korea`s aging population, Kim predicted the potential economic growth rate will drop from around 5 percent to 4.21 percent between 2010 to 2019; 2.91 percent in the 2020s, 1.6 percent in the 2030s and 0.74 percent in the 2040s.
The prediction is based on the assumption that the productivity growth of the nation`s economic inputs such as labor and capital stay at 1.5 percent and that the average birth rate remains at 1.19.
A rise in the birth rate leads to a fall in private saving as parents have to spend more to raise more children, but in the long-run could raise the nation`s economic growth by increasing the number of employed people, Kim explained.

The Chuosun Ilbo

Korea's Birth Rate Hits All-Time Low
Korea's birth rate plunged to an estimated all-time low last year, opposition Grand National Party lawmakers Ahn Myoung-ock and Yim Tae-hee announced Sunday.
Based on new births reported through the electronic family registry system of the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs, they said the number of newborns nationwide was 481,085, down 12,300 from 2003.
The birth rate is estimated to have plunged to its lowest point ever at 1.15. The lowest total fertility rate recorded so far was the 1.17 recorded in 2002. However, official statistics could look different since the National Statistical Office publishes birth statistics as of the end of every June.

The Korea Times
Child Abusers to Face Harsher Punishment
By Soh Ji-young
Staff Reporter
Beginning July 29, people who regularly abuse children will face much heavier punishments as the government vows to better protect children’s rights.
Those convicted of child violence usually face up to 5 years in prison or 15 million won in fines. But under the strengthened laws, the maximum penalty will be over seven years in prison or 20 million won.
The harsher punitive measures, made possible through the passing of the revised children’s welfare law at the end of last year, will be enforced to curb the increasing number of cases of violence towards children.

The Korea Times
Expert Calls on Korea to Provide Legal Framework for Foster Care
By Soh Ji-young
Staff Reporter
Last month, a tragic incident was reported in Pusan where a couple abused two foster children they had taken in to pay off their credit card debts.
South Korea’s lack of legal systems for foster care and inadequate training systems for potential foster parents are the main reasons behind such tragedies, according to Chris Gardiner, president of the International Foster Care Organization (IFCO).
He came to Seoul on Jan. 31 on the invitation of the Korean Foster Care Association, one of the IFCO’s member organizations, to assess the foster care system here.

152 male lawmakers push to scrap 'hoju'
Prospects for abolishing by the year's end the controversial "hoju" system, barring women from heading a family, received a big boost yesterday from a majority of male lawmakers of the National Assembly.
"We will strive by all means to abolish the hoju system before the end of this year. The evil system has been trespassing on women's rights for centuries," Rep. Lee Kye-ahn of the ruling Uri Party read from a statement by 152 male lawmakers.
The 152 comprised 139 male lawmakers from Uri and the Democratic Labor Party, 10 from the main opposition conservative Grand National Party and three from the Millennium Democratic Party. There are 259 male lawmakers in the 299-member 17th Assembly.
The present family registry system requires that a male becomes the family head in all but a few exceptions, leaving space for awkward situations where an infant boy can assume the position of family head and is given more rights in handling family assets than his mother or grandmother.
Also, under the system, divorced women are often left out in the cold because even if their children live with them, the children are still considered part of her ex-husband's family registry.
If bills to abolish hoju get past the committee stage and are approved at tomorrow's plenary session, hoju will be replaced by a new system that creates separate records of birth, death, marriage and adoption for each individual member of a family.

The Korea Times
90% of Girls Consider Marriage a Choice
By Kim Rahn
Staff Reporter
Nine out of 10 teenage girls think marriage is a choice, not a must, according to a survey, while less than 20 percent of male and female teenagers think marriage is necessary.
According to a study by the Presidential Committee on the Ageing Society and Population Policy and the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, 16.8 percent of teenagers said people should get married. The research was conducted last September on 11,250 fifth and sixth graders at elementary schools and students at middle and high schools nationwide.
Girls outnumbered boys when asked whether marriage was a choice, as 90 percent of girls surveyed said marriage is not necessary, while 77.2 percent of boys agreed.

The Korea Times
157,000 Children Adopted Overseas
By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
A total of 157,145 Korean children were adopted by foreigners during the past 50 years, the Overseas Korean Foundation reported Tuesday, and the majority of the children went to the United States.
The foundation, an organization affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, said that 103,095 of the adopted children were sent to the U.S., while France, Sweden and Denmark received 11,090, 8,953 and 8,571, respectively.
The year 1985 saw the greatest number of overseas adoptions, with 8,837 children being received abroad. According to reports the number has steadily begun to decrease by 1,000 to 2,000 every year.

The Hankyoreh
4 in 10 teen girls unhappy with her appearance
Plastic surgery viewed as solution by many, study shows

A high school student, Yu Na-yeong, 18, shot an 18-minute drama called "Michuhwanmong" ahead of graduation. It is the story of a girl worrying over the fact that she has "single-lidded" eyes, or without a crease in the lids when she opens them fully.
In Korea, it is often thought that "double eyelids" improves one’s appearance, in emulation of the shape of Western eyes.
Yu had watched the mainstream movie "200 Pound Beauty" with some of her friends. In the movie, an obese woman was reborn into a beauty after undergoing full-body plastic surgery. Then she managed to reconcile with the "past" and succeeded in work and love. About the movie, Yu commented, "The movie has received some favorable criticism that it does a good job of addressing the social problem of an appearances-first attitude, but I felt that it encouraged plastic surgery."

Adoption in Korea, Then and Now
Eleana Kim
The adoption of South Korean children into Western families has been ongoing since the end of the Korean War (1950-1953). Since then, more than 200,000 children have been sent overseas for adoption, with more than half adopted to the United States, and the rest to Western Europe, Canada, and Australia. South Korea’s foreign adoption program is the longest running program in the world, and is also a source of continual political controversy and public debate. The following presents a brief overview of the history of adoption from Korea and addresses some of the cultural and social factors that are related to the adoption issue.
Adoption in Korean History
It is often said that one reason children from Korea need to be adopted by families in foreign countries is because there is no tradition of adoption in Korean culture. This is, in fact, only partially true. In his book Korean Adoption and Inheritance (Cornell University 1983), anthropologist Mark Peterson argues that adoption in pre-modern Korea was historically linked to the problem of family inheritance and continuity of the bloodline. Since the Confucian transformation of Korean society in the 17th century, adoption has been a solution for ensuring the continuation of the father’s bloodline in the case of infertility or the inability to have sons.
In the 17th century, the ruling class (yangban) adopted an orthodox form of Confucianism from China, and instituted the Confucian Clan Code as a state ideology. This code excluded women from inheritance and thus drastically reduced their social status, whereas it gave men, especially first-sons, exclusive control over politics, property, and the family. A woman’s value under this system was directly related to her ability to produce sons for her husband’s family, in order to ensure the continuity of the patrilineal bloodline. With this transformation to neo-Confucianism, males became the exclusive heirs to family property and were the only ones permitted to perform ancestral rites. According to this code, only male relatives of a younger generation could be adopted from the patriline, usually between the ages of 20 and 30, so that they could inherit property and uphold the tradition of ancestor worship. After the yangban class instituted this conservative system, it gradually spread through Korean society, becoming the ideal model for family and social organization.
Before this conservative transformation of Korean society, however, women and men had equal rights to inheritance and women’s family genealogy was as important as men’s. There is evidence that until the 17th century, unrelated abandoned children were often adopted, as well as children related through the wife’s family. In addition, widows and unmarried women also adopted children. Despite this evidence of Korean adoption practices that share similarities to contemporary Western adoption, Mark Peterson in 1977 reported that Koreans understood adoption only in neo-Confucian terms, and that they found the American adoption of non-relatives to be “incomprehensible.”