People Blamed and Pitied My Mom for Not Having a Son
I saw it all as a child — South Korean society’s unfair treatment of my mother for not bearing a son.
My mom got pregnant.
Her belly started to bulge. She wasn’t a big eater, but suddenly she devoured a whole bowl of rice with a fierce appetite, saying she was eating for two people.
When I drew a family picture in kindergarten, I started including the new sibling growing inside my mom’s belly.
Even though I was too little and didn’t grasp the concept of probabilities well, being a daughter myself, I had a feeling that the next one would be a son.
My mom also had a hunch that it might be a son because the baby kicked strongly in her belly. She even dreamt a dream that could be interpreted as a sign of giving birth to a son. All our relatives predicted that the baby would be a boy.
Then, one day, my mom started having contractions, and I was quickly sent to my aunt’s house. A few days later, I visited my mom in the hospital.
However, all the adults, whom I expected to be happy, didn’t seem joyful at all.
My grandmother, Dad’s mom, was angry, reprimanding, ‘Why did you give birth to a daughter?’ My aunt, Mom’s big sister, apologized, saying, ‘I’m sorry she gave birth to a daughter.’ Mom was crying in the hospital bed.
Even inside the taxi on the way back home, my grandmother continued to express anger, insisting that it was my mom’s fault for giving birth to a girl instead of a boy.
I was only six years old and couldn’t fully comprehend the situation. But I was a logical kid. I am also a girl. I had to ask this question.
“Grandma, did you react like this when I was born?”
Then, my grandmother fell silent.
Murderous fixation on having a boy
Statistics reveal how much Koreans of that time desired to have sons. In 1990, when son preference was at its highest, there were 116.5 boys born for every 100 girls. For first-born children, the ratio was 108.5 boys for every 100 girls.
It gets worse.
For second-born children, there were 117.1 boys for every 100 girls. For third-born children, it was 189.9 boys. In the case of Daegu, a region known for its conservative values, the sex ratio for third-born children skyrocketed to a staggering 394.3.
This means that while many parents didn’t mind having daughters as their first child, they became increasingly obsessed with having sons as their second or third child.
They would undergo ultrasound examinations, and if the baby was determined to be a girl, they would opt for abortion.
Many women went through repeated pregnancies and childbirth until they had a son. It is quite common to see a Korean family consisting of a little brother with many older sisters. That’s why.
Having a son implied a superior social standing
Mom couldn’t have more children due to health issues. Giving birth to my younger sister was already a risky endeavor. We became a family of four, with two sisters.
As I grew up and entered my late teens, I started working part-time at a restaurant. The owner, a lady, proudly boasted about her four daughters and her youngest son. I didn’t pay much attention to it. Who cares, as long as I get paid my minimum wage?
Then one day, she asked me if I had any siblings. I told her I had a younger sister. In response, she looked at me with an astonishingly sad face and said, “Just two daughters? Oh dear, what a pity for your mother.”
I couldn’t believe that such people still existed in the 21st century. Her reaction was quite ridiculous and absurd to me. I found it strangely funny, so I shared the story with my mom.
Mom wasn’t surprised at all, as if she had heard such things countless times before, and she simply said, “Well, people have always treated me with pity.”
That’s how I learned that having only daughters and no sons was considered a significant shame and misfortune in South Korea.
It was one of the many reasons I found the society suffocating and ultimately made the decision to move abroad.
The sentiment behind Korea’s strikingly low birth rate
Korean women born in the late 1980s to 1990s are the ones who barely survived in a society where sex-selective abortions were prevalent.
They were raised hearing, “It is customary to give away the chicken drumstick to your brothers,” encouraged to be supporters rather than leaders in school and pressured to pursue careers that were considered “suitable for married women,” such as civil servants or teachers.
Among OECD countries, South Korea overwhelmingly holds the top position in terms of the gender pay gap for many consecutive years.
Women earn only 68.5% of what men make.
And then the time came for this group of women to consider starting a family. But they are hesitant because they are well aware of how society treats women.
This sentiment has led to the lowest birth rate in the world.
The total birth rate of South Korea was 0.7 in 2023, and it is projected to drop to 0.65 by 2025.
Experts predict that the population will decrease by 30% in 50 years.
The male-dominated government attributes reasons such as ‘high housing prices’ and a ‘competitive educational environment’ while coming up with various foolish measures.
They have attempted to exempt men from military service if they have three or more children. Additionally, they have even created a pink-coloured map to locate ‘childbearing-aged women.’
In my opinion, these reasons are far from the fundamental cause, and the measures are nowhere near solving the problem. In a place where women are not treated humanely, and when they are aware of it, they simply do not want to have children.
We have witnessed our potential sisters being aborted and our moms being blamed for not having a son. We simply don’t want to perpetuate the discrimination we have experienced throughout our entire lives.
South Korea is experiencing a significant decline in population growth.
David Coleman, a demographics professor at the University of Oxford, issued a stark warning that “Korea faces a danger of extinction by 2750 at this rate.”
I’m not particularly sad or regretful about it. I just see it as a plausible consequence of a misogynistic society.
