[WHY] Why were Koreans kept in the dark about their baby's sex?

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Published: 01 Mar. 2024, 16:37

[WHY] Why were Koreans kept in the dark about their baby's sex?

Images of blue and pink cupcakes indicating a baby’s gender. [SHUTTERSTOCK]

Initially released on Jan. 27, this story has been updated following a Constitutional Court's ruling on fetal gender disclosure on Feb. 28.

One of the biggest joys of expectant parents is learning the unborn baby’s sex. But before a landmark ruling in February, Korean parents had to go through quite a hassle to be able to experience that joy due to a restriction that barred physicians from informing expectant parents of the fetus's sex.

That left a lot of curious pregnant women to rely on online community websites, ferociously asking other women about the potential gender of their baby based on the ultrasound photos. But the recent ruling by the Constitutional Court will eliminate that inconvenience.

The court on Feb. 28 ruled it was unconstitutional to conceal the gender until 32 weeks of pregnancy, as it infringes on the parents' right to know.

"Restricting doctors from informing [parents] of the fetus's sex is an inadequate means for the legislative aim of protecting the fetus's life," the court said. "It also overly constrains the parents' right to have access to information about the fetus's sex, which contradicts the rule of minimizing damage during infringement."

Before the court decision, many expectant moms turned to community apps to ask other pregnant women as they were unable to find out directly from their doctors. Some hoped to get an answer from the shape of their baby bump or even the frequency of fetal movements.

Mommytalk, a popular community app for moms in Korea, is filled with ultrasound baby pictures uploaded by future moms desperately craving an answer to one simple question: “Am I having a girl or a boy?”

Gender reveal restriction

The ban dates back to 1987 when a law that prohibits physicians from revealing the information was introduced.

The prohibition intended to resolve sex imbalance in the country by preventing abortions of female fetuses, caused by a strong preference for sons in the widespread Confucian belief that males carry on family lineage.

Korea’s Constitutional Court overturned the ban in 2008, saying the country has grown out of a preference for sons and that the restriction violates parents’ right to know. But the following year the court ordered that parents can only find out the baby’s gender when a woman is 32 weeks into her pregnancy, causing a strong social backlash.

A pregnancy is considered full-term at 39 weeks.

The restriction forced some pregnant women to see multiple doctors until they found one willing to give out the information. Some purchased a gender prediction kit, which identifies a baby's sex through a blood test, from overseas.

Moms sometimes shared information on the willingness of their doctor to risk giving out that information.

“My doctor is famous for not telling baby’s gender, and I’ve been told that I’ll only be able to find out the sex of my baby when I am at 32 weeks,” wrote a commenter before the ruling who was in the 15th week of her pregnancy on MommyTalk. “So I went to a different hospital and heard that it’s a girl.”

The information is almost too easy to know outside Korea.

“I was able to almost immediately find out the sex of my baby upon becoming pregnant,” said Mila, 33, a Seoul-based Pilates instructor, who gave birth in California in 2019.

“After a noninvasive fetal trisomy test, a blood test, the doctor told me the sex of the baby without any reluctance and even without my asking,” she added. “The doctor just said ‘here’s the peanut,’ pointing at his genitals.”

A baby’s sex can be discovered through a blood test, from as early as 10 weeks of pregnancy. The test aims to detect genetic conditions, including Down Syndrome and other chromosomal variations.

In Korea, even physicians were not informed of the information on the unborn’s sex from a pregnant woman’s blood test result. This means doctors also had to rely on ultrasound exams to find out the sex of the unborn.

An expectant mom at week 14 of her pregnancy asks online community members to help her predict the sex of the unborn on Mommytalk, a community for expectant parents. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

Closely reading doctors’ faces

Put in a dilemma between compliance with the law and meeting the expectations of desperately curious parents, many doctors had to disclose the information indirectly.

Common expressions they used to indicate a girl were “I don’t see anything between the legs,” “You should buy pink shoes” or “The unborn resembles the mother.”

For a boy, they said the opposite.

But assumptions based on ultrasound exams sometimes led to mistakes by doctors.

“I was indirectly told by my doctor that the unborn would be a daughter when I was 16 weeks pregnant, so I shopped for baby products for a girl,” said Hur Da-hee, an office worker and the mother of a three-year-old. “But I was told that I would be having a son in week 21. I was so confused.”

A baby’s penis or vulva begins forming as early as six weeks. But boys and baby girls look very similar on ultrasound until about 14 weeks. Even after 14 weeks, it could be difficult to confirm the sex of the unborn depending on its position in the womb.

Criticisms from all parties involved

Critics argued that sex-selective abortion hardly occurs these days, making the ban meaningless.

“It is a unilateral regulation without a legislative principle,” said Kim Jae-yeon, Chairman of the Korean Association of Obstetricians & Gynecologists.

“The sole purpose of the regulation is to prevent abortion based on sex, which is no longer effective, as proven by the balanced sex ratio in Korea. Also, there are no scientific or medical grounds on why it should be 32 weeks in pregnancy that expectant parents should be allowed to learn of the unborn’s sex.”

The number of males per 100 females in Korea reached 104.7 as of 2022, down 0.4 from a year earlier, according to Statistics Korea’s preliminary data last February. The ratio was the lowest since the agency started compiling the data in 1990 when the figure stood at 116.5.

Sometimes, expectant parents need to know the sex of the unborn for health reasons.

“In some cases, parents need to know the sex of the baby for health reasons, as some genetic illnesses or diseases are only specifically carried down to a boy or a girl,” Kim said.

For instance, males have a higher chance of developing more severe fragile X syndrome, a common inherited cause of intellectual disability, because there is a mutation of their single X chromosome.

“There aren’t regulations to ban sex disclosure of babies anywhere else in the world, except for in Korea,” Kim added.

Other doctors had raised similar voices.

“The ban on disclosing an unborn’s sex has lost its effectiveness since the mid-2010s when artificial intervention on children’s sex has almost been eliminated,” the Korean Medical Association said in a statement to the constitutional court last year.

“Unlike in the past, the number of high-risk pregnancies has increased” as an increasing number of women push back on childbirth. “So identifying the sex is medically needed. It is unfair to only punish doctors that inform [the information] when it was the parents that wanted to confirm the sex of the unborn.”

The average age of mothers was 33.5 as of 2022 compared to 31.6 a decade earlier, according to the Statistics Korea data. The figure has stayed above 30 since 2005.

“[Doctors] tacitly inform the sex [of the fetus] and police investigation hardly takes place [for the violation of the law] so the law has practically become invalidated,” an attorney Kang Seong-min, 38, told the JoongAng Ilbo, before the recent ruling. Kang filed the constitutional appeal in March 2022. That forced moms, dads and doctors to act illegally, he argued.

BY JIN MIN-JI [jin.minji@joongang.co.kr]