Some historical context that might be of use to one or two lonely grad students reading this comment :) As a US peace corps volunteer working in a very rural he

Some historical context that might be of use to one or two lonely grad students reading this comment :) As a US peace corps volunteer working in a very rural health center in South Korea (one paved road in a large county, many villages still without electricity), it was impossible not to notice the huge push the Park Chung Hee government was making into birth control. Pres. Park was convinced that Korea's very high birth rate was an anchor around his plans for economic development and so devoted substantial government resources toward reducing it. Many families had 5-8 children, especially in the first four were daughters, as at the time there was an overwhelming preference for sons. This preference generally changed to daughters sometime in the 1990s. In practice Park's birth control program meant that every township (면, about 10,000 in population) outside the cities had a special nurse devoted to birth control (가족계획요원) operating out of the local township center. My job involved tuberculosis control out in the villages, so I came to know these nurses well. In practice they provided information on birth control to all married women and were tasked with keeping track of the menstrual cycles of all married women, a fact I found extraordinary at the time and still do in memory. Additionally, the government encouraged vasectomies financially (esp. for government employees) and there were often long lines of anxious-looking men outside our health center awaiting the procedure. There are many reasons for the low birth rate in contemporary South Korea, but the inflection point came in the 1970s and the now long-forgotten family planning nurses were at the forefront of this change.