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www.groovekorea.com / May 2014 72 Stories like these are not unique, Kim from Wom- enlink said. “Korean women are forced to make this choice secretly and hastily, and since everyone involved in an abortion could potentially be arrested and indicted, and because people are still reluctant to talk about sex,” she said, “proper health services are not allowed. Women need more information. They need more sex education.” Last year, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology raised the number of hours required for sex education from 10 to 15 per year. But as the JoongAng Daily reported in a story that year, there is not a standard national curriculum for the subject and classes often consist of a video. One teacher said that even if there were a good curriculum, par- ents wouldn’t want their children to take time away from their studies to learn about sex. In 2012 Cha Chi-young, a professor in the nurs- ing department at Ewha Womans University, re- marked to The Korea Herald that sex education in Korea is an extreme failure. “It focuses strongly on virginity, which is of no interest to students. As a consequence, they are getting unreliable information from the Internet, nothing practical or useful.” And in a country where most people report having their first sexual encoun- ter at age 14, without contraception, she said, it stands to reason that unwanted pregnancies are on the rise. Professor Wolman concurs: Contraception, and the lack of education on its use, is a key issue. “The reasons for the large quantity of abortions in Korea are complex, but they clearly center on con- traception. There are no socially acceptable means of it,” he said, referencing a study that suggests an extremely high prevalence of both the rhythm method and withdrawal methods at a combined 20.5 percent (in the U.S., that number is 3.2 per- cent). “Condoms and birth control pills have yet to achieve significant market exposure and are widely mistrusted by Korean women,” he said, an unsur- prising statistic considering contraceptives have only been allowed to appear on TV since 2006. But Kim stresses that although some classes only cover the “physical traits of the opposite sex,” she’s been seeing improvements in Korea’s sex educa- tion programs and in the promotion of contracep- tion. During her research for “I Had an Abortion,” she only found one case in which a woman who’d had an abortion was too shy to suggest contracep- tion. And even still, she said, “this woman was pret- ty old. It’s true that Korean women are reluctant to talk liberally about sex, but I’m not sure young people feel that way so much anymore.” The education situation Edited by Jenny Na (jenny@groovekorea.com) INSIGHT Never force a baby out of a mother’s womb! I may be small, but I am alive! Even the smallest actions can prevent physical and emotional harm! It all starts with a small effort!