Abuses Alleged in S. Korea’s Now-Banned Sterilization of Mentally Ill

In 1982, when Yu suffered a depression so severe he refused to leave his house, was afraid to meet anyone, shouted at his family and sometimes threw things in rage, his parents called a local mental institution to come and take him away.

When he arrived there, he says, he was left with his feet chained together for a week. In three subsequent years of imprisonment, he says, he never saw a doctor or had a court hearing but was caged and repeatedly beaten--once with an ax handle--for trying to escape. On Sept. 28, 1983, he says, he was brought into the director’s office, tied to a bed, held down and sterilized.

Yu (who asked that his first names not be used) is now a 44-year-old taxi driver in Seoul. He kept his sterilization a shameful secret until this summer, when opposition lawmaker Kim Hong Shin alleged that at least 175 mentally ill or mentally retarded people were forcibly sterilized in South Korea from 1974 through the early 1990s, with one case reported as late as 1996. Kim believes the true number to be much higher.

Only last year, a 24-year-old law imposed by former President Park Chung Hee permitting involuntary sterilization of mentally ill or mentally retarded South Koreans was repealed. The move came--without fanfare--after new President Kim Dae Jung, a former dissident, called for the country’s legal codes to be updated to remove laws deemed likely to lead to human rights abuses.

Unlike infamous cases in the United States, Sweden and other Western nations where efforts to improve the genetic stock led to forced sterilizations of those believed to be inferior, South Korea’s sterilizations appear to stem mainly from an overzealous population-control policy imposed by a series of harsh military dictatorships.

As part of an ardent nation-building campaign to end the abject poverty and the baby boom that followed the 1950-53 Korean War, strongman Park instituted a family planning program in 1961 aimed at persuading Koreans to “stop at two” children.

But the government’s mobilization of thousands of birth-control workers, who were given regional quotas for births and sterilizations, invited abuse, lawmaker Kim said in a recent interview.

“They were given incentives if their records were good--overseas trips and so on,” Kim said. “So who are the most likely candidates for sterilization?”

Under the family planning push, contraceptives, and later the birth-control pill, were enthusiastically distributed. Abortion is illegal, but it is easily obtained. Beginning in 1962, married people with children, including army reservists reporting for duty, were urged to volunteer for sterilization. Many thousands did.

South Korea’s family planning program is considered a dramatic success and has frequently been compared favorably with China’s draconian one-child policy. The declining birthrate--from 4.51 per woman in the 1970s to 1.56 in 1997--is seen as a major factor in South Korea’s extraordinary improvement in living standards.

In this social climate, it is perhaps not surprising that lawmaker Kim’s revelations about sterilization of the mentally ill and mentally impaired have drawn little reaction from the South Korean public.

Kim alleges that although the law permitted sterilizations, the 175 procedures he uncovered were illegal because the facilities never received permission from the Health and Welfare Ministry, as required under the law. In addition, Kim claims that sterilizations were performed on unmarried people, who, in keeping with Korea’s Confucian traditions, must have parental consent to be sterilized regardless of their age.

The ministry has ordered local authorities across the nation to conduct investigations of all welfare facilities to discover whether illegal surgeries took place. Its own probe has been hampered by the fact that there are no records whatsoever about sterilizations at the ministry headquarters in Seoul, a spokesman said.

It is unclear what legal rights patients would have even if it were proved that they had been illegally sterilized. Taxi driver Yu said he has been advised that he has no right to sue because the statute of limitations on his mistreatment has expired.

Yu, who is articulate and well-informed and says he has had no recurrence of his depression, calls the treatment of the inmates at the Eun Sung Retreat Center in the southern city of Kwangju, where he was held, “a serious violation of human rights.”

He said about 120 men and women, including other mentally ill patients, vagabonds and alcoholics, were sterilized with him over the course of two days. “We were treated like pigs and dogs,” Yu said. “You do this only to pigs and dogs.”

Yu wants the government to apologize and compensate him by paying the estimated $1,775 cost of an operation to reverse his vasectomy. Although a doctor told him that the chances of success are slim, he wants to try. When he sees couples walk by with children, he says, he is filled with envy.

“I would like to live like other normal people before I get too old,” Yu said.

“My hope is that we now have a president who is an advocate of human rights,” he added. “I hope this human rights president, Kim Dae Jung, will address this problem and restore our honor and our pride.”

While treatment of the mentally ill and impaired is much improved in recent years, patients and their families are still often stigmatized. And with the democratization of the 1990s, grass-roots citizens movements have begun to draw attention to the concerns of the mentally and physically disabled, but the movement has a long way to go, advocates said.

For example, the director of the facility where Yu was held in Kwangju was arrested in 1983 and accused of beating, chaining and otherwise abusing the inmates, charges that were widely reported in the local press. The man was imprisoned for a month but then released and allowed to return to his job as head of the center he had founded. Yu said the sterilizations occurred one month after the director’s return.

When Yu and lawmaker Kim visited the facility this summer to seek records of the sterilizations, they were received by the very same director, they said. The man denied any wrongdoing and said he had sterilized only 10 inmates, including Yu, but failed to produce any records, the lawmaker said.

At the Jungshimwon center for the mentally impaired in Boryong, southwest of Seoul, director Kwon Ho Sun freely admits sterilizing 57 retarded inmates. Kwon said records were not kept of the sterilizations because no one considered the procedure controversial.

“It was taken for granted that people with such diseases would be sterilized,” Kwon said. “Public servants were asked to meet quotas, to recommend sterilization prospects as part of the family planning drive. There was no sense of guilt or impropriety, so nobody paid much attention to it.”

When relatives were available, their permission was sought, but most of the patients had been abandoned as children by their parents, Kwon said. Even today, of the 208 mentally retarded patients, only about 30 receive visits, Kwon said.

He said he has no objection to allowing his patients to have children--provided the government provides him with the budget and staff to care for the inmates as well as their children. But the institution is strapped by the Asian economic crisis, and his hopes of opening supported-living houses where patients could live as families in the community are no more than a dream.

Lawmaker Kim alleges that patients at Jungshimwon and other facilities say they want children and express sadness that they cannot have them. Director Kwon, however, said that many of his patients cannot understand what that would mean, and that their statements about the desire to have children or not vary with their moods.

Patient Lee Sun Ok, 34, who was sterilized before her marriage in 1985, can read simple fairy tales and recite her wedding date, and affectionately introduces her husband to visitors.

Lee is still upset by the loss of her parents, who dumped her at Jungshimwon when she was 10 and never returned.

“I lost them,” she said. “I wish I could find them. I cannot remember their faces now.”

But asked about children, Lee said: “I know I can’t have babies. I love little kids. I wish I could have them. . . . But there are small children here and I play with them. There are 20 little boys here. I help take care of them.”

Kim Kyong Ae, who is in her mid-30s and has Down’s syndrome, was sterilized before her marriage in 1990. She cannot speak but pulls a visitor by the hand into the bedroom she shares with her husband, proudly shows off the wedding photo hanging on the wall, and gestures that she would like to be photographed.

Lawmaker Kim alleges that many such marriages were forced in order to cover up illegal sterilizations and that patients like Kim were in no position to give consent.

Staffer Kim Hee Soon says people like Kim might not be able to speak, but they communicate their attachments, and the staff has respected their wishes by arranging marriages.

As Kim walks through the hallways, patients hug her, kiss her and hold her hands. She said she is stung by lawmaker Kim’s allegations of abuse.

“Now, of course, [sterilization] is no longer necessary” because of better methods of birth control, she said. “But what I want to ask him is, what is your solution? What should we do? What do you do in America?”

Researcher Chi Jung Nam in the Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.