Reproductive Contributory Rights: From Patriarchal to Patriotic Fertility?

Abstract

South Korea’s demographic restructuring has been no less radical than its socioeconomic transformations. Individual behaviors and familial choices determining demographic parameters such as marriage, fertility, and migration have closely reflected South Koreans’ intense desire and active effort to participate in their nation’s literally explosive development and modernization on all fronts. In a sense, the full realization of their citizenship rights has been conditioned upon their active demographic behaviors attuned to the qualifications for and opportunities from such progresses. However, the latest neoliberal era of massive socioeconomic disenfranchisement has been accompanied by radical changes in demographic indicators, including the arguably world’s lowest fertility rate worrying the entire nation. The politically insinuated patriotism in young citizens’ marriage and parenthood seems to have been rather counterproductive because of a feeling that their fundamental individual(ist) rights to marriage and parenthood, as well as their possible children’s future, are arbitrarily subjugated to the state’s unreservedly professed technocratic necessities.