Kyeong-Soo Lee, Prof, Pock-Soo Kang, Prof, and Tae-Yoon Hwang. College of Medicine Dept. of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, Yeungnam Univesity, 317-1 Daemyeong-dong, Nam-gu 705-717, Daegu, South Korea, 82-53-620-4375, kslee@med.yu.ac.kr

This study was conducted with 378 reproductive aged women to analyze the degree and reasons of preferring certain sex and analyze the percentage of people who were put under pressure and the relationship between the intention and experience to have a child of a certain sex through artificial means. With 378 reproductive aged women who lived in Gyeongju City in South Korea. We investigated social demographic characteristics, degree of preference of a child of certain sex and the reasons of the preference and experience of have gotten pressure to have a certain sex child using a self-administered questionnaire. The preference of boys was high in those groups where people were older than 40 and those with low economic status, those who have less education, whereas the awareness of sex unbalance was low in these people. About forty-eighty of those respondents answered to have gotten pressure from their parents in-laws or from their parents on having boys and the rate of those people who have gotten pressure to have boys was 55.8% according to children's composition of having only daughters, showing a relative high rate than the other groups. Those groups who have gotten pressure from their parents showed a high degree of subjective stress, the intention of having children selective of sex was high, and actual ratio of sex-selective birth experience was high. As a method of improving the problem of unbalanced sex ratio, pushing for improving social structure of sex discrimination needed to be pursued and enlightening on the thinking of having boys needs to be conducted.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognized the reasons of the unbalanced sex ratio are strong preference of boys under traditional Confucius culture, tendency to have less children, and selective sex birth through artificial abortion in South Korea.
• Analyze the degree and reasons of preferring certain sex according to social demography, and analyze the percentage of people who were put under pressure and had experienced subjective stress to have a child of certain sex
• Identified the relationship between the intention and experience to have a child of a certain sex through artificial means so that the results could be utilized basic data to come up with ways to improve the male preference thinking.

Keywords: Abortion, Asian Women

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: mother and child health organizations ot research institute
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.