Abortion and contraception in the Korean fertility transition.

Abstract

Data from the Korean Fertility Survey were used to analyze the relationship between the use of abortion and contraception among married women in Korea, a society experiencing a rapid fertility decline. Fieldwork for the Korean WFS was conducted between August and December 1974 among a sample of 5420 ever married women aged 15-49. The WFS sample is a self-weighting, nationally representative probability sample based on a 3-stage design. The response rate was 95%. All indications are that the data are both representative of the universe of married women in the reproductive period and of high quality. For this report data collected from 4867 once married women with no history of prolonged marital separation were used. As the study purpose was to examine the interval specific utilization of fertility control measures, the sample was restricted to those with uninterrupted exposure to childbearing since the 1st marriage. These women represent 90% of all ever married women interviewed. The remaining 563 women were either no longer in their 1st marriage or had experienced periods of marital separation of sufficient length to affect fertility. At the time of the survey, contraception was currently being used by 46% of all exposed women. 31% of the currently married respondents reported having had at least 1 abortion; the average number per woman in this group was 1.9. Of the approximately 23,800 pregnancies occurring to women before the survey, 14% had ended in induced abortion. Use of induced abortion increased with the number of completed pregnancies a woman had. Only 11.3% of those who had never used a contraceptive method had an induced abortion. Among past, but not current contraceptive users, 41.2% have had an induced abortion. Among current (nonsterilized) users, 48.6% have had an induced abortion. Women were anywhere from 2-6 times as likely to have used contraception during a specified pregnancy interval in 1970-74 than were women a decade earlier. The data indicate that there has been an increase over time in the proportion of women having their 1st abortion early in the reproductive period. While slightly less than 2% of all 1st pregnancies ended in 1st abortion in 1960-64 period, almost 8% of the 1st pregnancies that occurred between 1970-74 ended in a 1st abortion. Use of induced abortion at the pregnancy outcome immediately subsequent to that of the 1st abortion follows a very different pattern from that of contraception. Those women whose 1st abortion occurred later in the reproductive cycle were more likely to use abortion in the subsequent pregnancy than were those whose 1st experience with induced abortion occurred early. The increasing use of abortion and contraception has markedly reduced higher order births.