- Headline: "Op-Ed: The Alarming Rise of Unwed Mothers"
- Source: Kyunghyang Shinmun
- Date of Publication: May 14, 1976
- Summary:
The troubling surge in unwed mothers is directly linked to the growing number of abandoned children and illegitimate births. Yet, despite this stark reality, there is a disturbing trend of treating premarital relations and unwed motherhood as something ordinary. The government must take swift and decisive action to address this issue at its core at a national level. According to Holt Children’s Services, the number of unwed mothers has skyrocketed sixteenfold in just six years, with their ages growing alarmingly younger. These women are often unemployed, working as maids, factory hands, or still in school. Many, with little education, fall into this unfortunate fate due to fleeting curiosity or reckless impulse. Stronger family values and a more rigorous approach to sex education must be enforced to curb this crisis. A key factor in this trend, which cannot be ignored, is the issue of runaways. Once these young women leave home, they often find themselves seeking comfort in the wrong places, only to end up as unwed mothers. The government and social institutions must take responsibility by providing educational programs and counseling services for female workers, ensuring they are guided away from this path of ruin. In the 1970s, media reports about the rise in unwed mothers spread widely, accompanied by the active production of a narrative that depicted young women from impoverished families—particularly those who were young (teenagers), uneducated (from factory towns), and influenced by sexual curiosity—as the primary group becoming unwed mothers. This discourse, which framed unwed mothers as stigmatized individuals and subjects in need of prevention, was largely produced and disseminated by adoption agencies. In the early 1970s, the Christian Adoption Program of Korea (CAPOK) was a central figure in this discourse. From the mid-1970s onward, after CAPOK's integration into Holt in 1975, the four major government-authorized overseas adoption agencies were Holt Children's Services, Social Welfare Services (now known as Korea Welfare Services), Korea Social Service, and Eastern Child Welfare Society (now known as Eastern Social Welfare Society). Scholars and the media also contributed to this framework by publishing studies that reinforced its legitimacy, while the government responded by developing a welfare system for unwed mothers and their children, including the expansion of shelters for unwed mothers. As a result, the number of babies adopted from unwed mothers increased dramatically, rising from 1,163 in the 1960s to 9,075 in the 1970s.
Reference: Hee Jung Kwon. The Birth of Unwed Mothers: The History of Exiled Mothers (unofficial translation). Antonia’s Books, 2019.
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