출산을 사회화하기 : 1960-70년대 한국의 가족계획사업

Abstract

This study examines Korea’s Family Planning Program in the 1960s and 70s. It suggests that the Program was more than a population control policy carried out on women’s bodies; it was a device to form modern subjects. This research reviews how the will to accumulate knowledge and the will to manage, driving forces behind modernity, came through in Korea’s Family Planning Program. By studying documents of the past, this study confirms that women’s bodies, responsible for childbirth, were put under the management of government administration and medical devices and to become objects of monitoring and lawmaking. With the goal of correcting the abnormality of excessive fecundity, the sex lives of individuals were captured by the surveillance of healthcare agents and accumulated as demographic data by statisticians. Members of families with more than three children acknowledged themselves as abnormal primitives. Based on this, this study shows that Korea’s Family Planning Program was a modern enlightenment campaign driven by the modern ideals of knowledge and management under the authoritarian military regime, leading to a new type of modern subject.