If you fail to recognize the sheer lack of respect towards a foreign culture displayed in that comment, there’s no point in posting these articles attempting to “fix” something that you are most definitely not a part of.

I guess there’s no point in trying to educate me with your comments then either, so it’s strange how you bother. As for not being part of what I’m writing about though, with 12 years in Korea under my belt, permanent residency, a Korean wife and 2 children, and a vested interest in the latter’s sex-education, then I put it to you that I’m just as much a part of it as you will ever be.

I might agree with if it wasn’t presented in such a way that assumes that a lack of sex-ed is due simply to the fact that Koreans would rather ignore the fact that they are having sex to save face in their culture.

“Assumes”? Again, in this and numerous other posts in the sex-education category (which I doubt you’ve bothered to read) I present the findings of multiple Korean sources that say precisely that. I also don’t notice you offering any alternative explanations.

There are a lot of things I think that you as a writer could improve on, especially on the point of considering reasons behind the actions you criticize. Your writing is very eloquent, well researched, and respectively convincing, , but at the same time you fringe upon disrespect in your critiques of a very prideful nation.

Sure: if I’d written this post now (you’re aware that it’s over 3 years old, right?), I would certainly have done it differently. I may even have spent more time “considering reasons behind the actions I criticize”, as I certainly do now. But still, it can’t have been that bad if you found it “very eloquent, well researched, and respectively convincing”, unless of course you’re just saying that in building up for yet another insult…

I think that comments like the one I replied to and blogs like yours only contribute to the miscommunication that has led to a very strongly held belief on Korea that foreigners do not belong. Look at the legislation that just passed that will cycle out all foreign English teachers in Korea within the next few years.

And there it is. If you knew the first thing about “the legislation that just passed that will cycle out all foreign English teachers in Korea”, which is actually just foreign teachers at public schools in Seoul, then you’d be aware that “miscommunication” like mine has nothing to do with it. Also, if you had any basic common sense, you’d know that people in any country who have the belief that “foreigners do not belong” invariably have that belief well before and/or despite any actual interaction with said foreigners, and that in Korea the tabloidish, muck-raking, xenophobic media is hardly going to challenge their confirmation biases.

In the rare case that any of them are jolted out of their comfort zones by the stark truths presented in my blog however, then so be it.

Call me racist, disrespectful, and/or ignorant then, but after all that I certainly don’t have time for any further communication with someone so willfully ignorant themselves, so obviously unwilling to actually read much of what they criticize, and so self-righteous as to be completely oblivious of the racism their own comments are saturated with.

Banned.

There are a lot of things I think that you as a writer could improve on, especially on the point of considering reasons behind the actions you criticize. Your writing is very eloquent, well researched, and respectively convincing, but at the same time you fringe upon disrespect in your critiques of a very prideful nation.

I think that comments like the one I replied to and blogs like yours only contribute to the miscommunication that has led to a very strongly held belief on Korea that foreigners do not belong. Look at the legislation that just passed that will cycle out all foreign English teachers in Korea within the next few years. If you want to enact these changes you advocate, I would suggest a more understanding tone and a little more respect for Korean culture. “Right” and “wrong” are very different things in different parts of the world. Your view has a place in how Korean culture should be shaped going forward, but the way you present your view makes all the difference.

Rather than petulant (really?) my last remark was simply asking if could agree with how I reworded your statement so that it was more clearly victim-less.

I’m not sure its fair to read into some of my statements that I am “belittling” the socio-economic injustices that women face when I clearly state over and over that societies that make people (women in this case) feel “forced” to do certain actions are sick/bad/unhealthy.

As to the second statement of mine that you quote lets break it down. First “If its just a temporary coping mechanism fine” What I meant here was in order to be sensitive, i.e. NOT to “belittle” women having abortions and in recognition that society is in many ways unfair to them it is fine/understandable why many women, again to use your words “use a victimized image.”. But again as you said, and in the second part of the my statement I said, ultimately not taking full ownership of the decision is dis-empowering and counter-productive for women.

I think the “normalization” of abortion as you called it can only happen if we have a two pronged approach. One we should condemn societies in which many people (again in this case women) feel forced to do certain actions (abortions here). Read my above comments, I did that many times. And two at the same time we should empower women to resist such coercion by encouraging them to make confident and “fully owned” decisions even when they are hard ones as is the case with abortion.

You asked about your tone? Check out these gems:

“Certainly blaming society has some potential psychological value in that it removes some level of responsibility from the aborter and hence lessens feelings of guilt. But I wonder if over time it is common for women who have had abortions to “face up” to their decision and take more ownership for it.”

In this section your point about ownership of the decision is lost in all the condescending blame you put on top first. Rather than making the point that women’s use of a victimized image is valid (in that there are still many prevalent social injustices that women consider reasons for abortion) but ultimately un-empowering you turn it into a matter of shirking responsibility and shifting guilt.

and here:
“If its just a temporary coping mechanism fine, but I think that we should be careful about how long we support this conceit.”

Again, you’re belittling the socio-economic injustices that very much play a part in a woman’s decision to abort, and her feelings of being ‘forced’ or ‘victimized’. Whilst such injustices are not wholly responsible for a woman’s decision nor is it healthy for her to identify as a victim, such injustices are real and valid concerns. The way you put it, it sounds like the whole thing is made up in the woman’s head in an attempt to runaway from feelings of guilt.

But more than these, I was reflecting the general response to your posts. Obviously the things you wrote and the way in which you wrote them ruffled more than a few feathers of the other posters. However, I saw you had some good points that weren’t being listened to, so I thought I’d help by trying to state them in a more clear and neutral manner. I obviously think I did, but I’ll let you and others be the judge.

As for your secondary comment, it looks like a petulant afterthought because your were insulted by my reference to your tone more than a valid point. But what the heck, I’ll get philosophical and explain myself anyway.

To live is to act and to make choices. Even to not take action is actually an active choice one has to make. Unless you are dead, you must make choices just about every second of the day. I say must because, as I said before, even not making a choice is a choice. If you really want to be picky, every single thing we do, with the exception of functions of the autonomic nervous system, is a choice.

So yes, a pregnant woman *has* to make a decision. She decides to keep it or she decides to abort it. Even if she does nothing that is making a choice. In no way does my use of the phrase “had to take” equate the more complex “forced choice” that you mention and that the article mentions. So let me rephrase:

“You can regret that you ever got pregnant and had to choose what to do without regretting the choice you make” This statement can work both ways. A woman who gets pregnant unintentionally and keeps the baby could just as equally regret that she ever got pregnant without regretting her decision to keep the child. Sure, you can keep working it backwards if you want, but eventually you’ll hit a dead end.

Look, I’ll even do it for you. Your counter-argument could be (excluding rape of course) that the woman chose to have sex which led to the pregnancy and thus to regret the pregnancy is to pawn off responsibility for the abortion. But, if you argue that way you’d have to agree that women should only have sex when they’re willing to take the risk of getting preggers. Which, you could do I suppose. Others certainly do. If you did you’d have to argue that men are also only meant to have sex for the purposes of reproduction. At which point the hypothetical men and women in question might shift their regret to having healthy sex drives. Do you see what happens if you follow this path of thought back long enough? You end up arguing against our very bodies and sex drives. And I don’t think anyone can argue that having a body with functioning reproductive organs and a sex drive is a choice. Of course, I acknowledge the biggest hole in this ridiculous line of thought is that having a healthy sex drive doesn’t equate acting on it. But the only choice if you want to go down that route is lifelong abstinence vs. never being allowed to regret an unintentional pregnancy lest you shirk your responsibility by doing so.

Ultimately my point is, one can take full ownership of a decision and still feel regret about having come to a situation requiring that decision without regretting the outcome of said decision.

Hope that clears things up for you. And now, unless I must defend my words against further ridiculousness I am done with this thing.

Notice that even hear you throw, probably unintentionally, in the “had to take a certain action.” Why not take full ownership and say “No I didn’t *have to* make that choice I but I did because I feel that it was the least worst option out of the possible choices and even so I am sad because I recognize that what I did was less than ideal.”

Maybe its being pedantic but, as you said claiming an action to be forced “undermines any attempts to normalize it in society.

You’re saying that they should stop being concerned about the child’s parentage and just go for it. You imply that they’re scared of having kids and are using the possibility of the conception being the result of rape to get an “out.” You then go on to say that you even disapprove of them giving the potential child up for adoption. That’s hardly sympathetic to a rape victim who, as Anonymous has said, does in fact think that there is a reasonable chance that the pregnancy is a result of the rape.

Like Maria pointed out in her post, making a decision to have or not have an abortion is a weighty matter and not one that is done lightly. Of the women I know who have had abortions, not one has made the decision quickly.

In fact, that long, hard process of making the decision– of being torn between the question of being a mother or not being a mother–can be extremely stressful and difficult.

Anyone who has ever struggled to make any major life decision can recognize and understand the torment that exists in indecisiveness. The horrible feeling of not knowing what you are going to decide- being sure of your decision one moment and questioning it the next. Indecisiveness produces a great deal of anxiety. I think we humans are hard-wired to feel it when we are faced with uncertainty in the future. We love to picture what our lives and futures will look like, but when we have entered the “valley of indecision,” we can’t do that. It’s like a whole part of ourselves– the future self– is no longer accessible.

That being said, I strongly suspect that the relief reported by women who have had the abortion is the relief that is felt after any difficult decision is made. More of a “Phew, at least that’s over. Thank God, I don’t have to think about it any more. Right or wrong, I don’t care, at least it’s DONE.” It’s that overwhelming feeling of relief when you know that you’ve crossed the “decision line” and you can now move on with your life. If the reported feelings of relief were closely analyzed, I suspect that this would be, at the very least, a majorly contributing factor.

As to the issue of the idea of “forced choice” in abortion– and again, I have to apologize for jumping in here before giving it all a thorough read-through–though I have skimmed– I should think the existence of forced choice should be quite obvious to everyone on both sides of this debate. The solution, however, is not to make abortion somehow “friendlier” or more acceptable, but to change the underlying issues “forcing” the choice. This includes better sex education, but it includes many, many other things as well. To claim that abortion, as it exists today across all societies, is an “empowering choice” for a woman is fantasy, pure and simple. In fact, I would argue that abortion– legal or not– is one of the most subtle tools we have of subverting women’s rights (or perhaps a better word would be “desires”) and collaborating with oppressive, patriarchal societal patterns.

Anecdotally, I know at least 9 women who have had abortions, and 1 woman who was going to have an abortion but backed out at the last possible minute. In 5 of those 9 cases I know these women well enough to have known the circumstances surrounding the decision to abort. In one case, the issue was the life of the mother. In the other four cases, factors other than whether these women wanted to have children or not were heavily at play. Three of those remaining four cases included abuse and manipulation by the men involved. And the fourth case included unreliability of the father and extreme poverty of the family in general.

If I got pregnant today, as a married woman in a stable relationship, with a stable job, a good husband with a good job, money saved up, very little debt, and the ability to stay-at-home it and live on my husband’s income? Society would expect me to keep the kid. Because that’s what my society says married, responsible adults should do.

Would I do what society expects and continue the pregnancy? Absolutely not.

I cannot say that I agree with everything our fellow commenter above has said or say that the tone it was expressed in was always umm…persuasive? However, his comments have gotten me thinking and I feel that while it was not expressed in the best way to convince others, he’s made a good point in regards to ownership of decision making.

Let’s try and look at things unemotionally and without questions of morality for a moment. The ultimate goal of pro-choice people and the majority of people that believe in women’s rights is for:

-women to have full autonomy and control over their bodies (it’s my body, don’t tell me what to do with it, etc)
-the stigma of unwed pregnancy, sex outside of marriage, and abortion to disappear from society
-a normalized view and acceptance of abortion across general society

I’d say these are the main ones. If I’ve missed the mark, my apologies. Now, if women truly want to accomplish these goals then they have to draw a clear line between recognizing and publicly addressing the wrongs of society against women and creating an overly victimized image of women.

It is disturbing for women to say they feel “forced” because “forced” implies that the “choice” was not an empowered, autonomous guilt-free decision that the word “choice” usually implies. The article seems to be trying to improve the face of abortion to its readers by using an oxymoronic method. On the one hand it makes much of the victimization of women having abortions, presumably not only to show that such unjust societal stigmas and socio-economic difficulties exist, but also to cultivate sympathy in the reader. Kind of like saying “it’s not our fault! Don’t hate us for doing it”. On the other hand, the ultimate solution to all of this is for abortion to be normalized and accepted as something undeserving of the word “fault” at all. These two viewpoints don’t gel with each other.

I would proposed that we have finally reached a point in the women’s rights movement (at least in the US) where we need to push beyond awareness of injustice, beyond letting people know we’re victims. We need to begin doing and living as we would have it be. If you want women to be able to talk about getting an abortion as freely as they talk about getting an unhealthy mole removed or changing jobs (or whatever important life-improving decisions you’d like to equate abortion to) then you can’t “come out” hiding behind a victimized image. If there’s truly nothing wrong with it and it’s truly an empowered and autonomous decision, undeserving of shame then why not act like it? Claiming that it’s a “forced choice” to do it undermines any attempts to normalize it in society. Furthermore, utterly denying the serious aspects and the negative feelings women experience when making that choice does nothing to defend women’s right to choose, it only signals an insecurity over its justification. If it’s right and just, there’s no need to not be real.

Let me expand:

I see nothing wrong or insulting with acknowledging that abortions are a serious matter and not decisions to be made lightly. Acknowledging such does not automatically imply guilt, shame, or immorality as some may jump to conclude. There are many grave decisions we all must make in life, and we often feel some kind of sadness or regret at the time of making such decisions. Afterwards, we may not regret having made it, and we may take ownership of that decision, but it doesn’t make it a happy one. You can regret that you ever had to take a certain action without regretting having taken it.

It seems like over-leaping the mark to claim that women who have abortions are all just happy and dandy during and afterwards. While those studies quoted above show no long-lasting mental and emotional affliction after abortion it is not the same thing as saying they were joyous occasions. Take for example the university student that shared her abortion experience in a post on this website. To quote, “Overall, it was not that much of a traumatic experience, but I won’t ever be able to forget the little bowl. It saddens me even now (end).” This is not evidence of a long lasting mental/emotional burden, but it does illustrate that it wasn’t a decision she enjoyed having to make. I agree that there’s plenty of evidence to show the over-riding emotion of people post-abortion is relief, but that doesn’t mean there is no sadness mingled with it.

There are many pro-choice advocates (including the author of this article) that acknowledge that a fetus is either a potential life or an actual life, but maintain for various reasons that it is still the woman’s right to choose whether it should be terminated or not. Taking this into account, I see nothing extraordinary or insulting about treating the decision to have an abortion as a somber matter. It is unnecessary to forfeit the autonomy and justification of the choice in order to confront its gravity.

- just this post alone shows evidence of many Koreans’ staggering lack of even basic knowledge about contraception and sexual matters, let alone hundreds of other posts on this blog. Just check out the “sex education” category for instance, most of which use Korean sources.

- it’s pretty clear that the original commenter meant “championing women’s rights and personal freedom” in many ways, not just (or even at all) sexually.

- saying abstinence is the only 100% effective way to prevent the STDs is uninformative and obvious. And yeah, it’s a bad thing because if people take it to heart then it would mean that they didn’t get to enjoy sex at all, when it’s perfectly safe if people are monogamous and use contraception properly.

- Koreans are having sex, regardless of what “outsiders” think about it. And it’s hardly imposing Western values on them to wish that they’d be a bit more educated about it.

http://www.thomsonmedical.com/index.htm