By Liz Townsend

Faced with a plunging national birthrate and an extremely high incidence of abortion, the South Korean government implemented programs in March to encourage childbirth and to strictly enforce the country’s 57-year-old ban on abortions, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“Our plan against illegal abortions is entirely separate from our low birthrate countermeasures,” said Rhee Won-hee, chief of the health ministry’s Family Support Division, according to the Associated Press (AP). “The comprehensive plan is to fight rampant disrespect for the sanctity of life.”

Long known as the “Abortion Republic,” South Korea had an abortion rate of 30 per 1,000 women of childbearing age in 2005. The United States, in comparison, had a rate of 20 per 1,000 women that year, the AP reported. In addition, the country had a 2009 birthrate of only 1.15 children per mother, the lowest in the world, according to the AP.

These dire numbers came in spite of a 1953 law that banned abortions except for rape and incest, fetal deformity, or the health of the mother.

The government formed a task force last November to study the country’s low birthrate and rampant number of abortions, insisting that the two are separate problems that must be addressed. Programs announced by the health ministry in March include encouraging childbirth, granting tax breaks and subsidies for medical fees and childrearing expenses, and taking steps to improve childcare, the AP reported.

South Korean physicians have formed a group called Pro-Life Doctors that has already reported facilities that continue to perform illegal abortions. “We believe the unborn child’s life must come first and that women’s happiness can never come from aborting a child,” Shim Sang-Duk of the group’s ethics committee told AFP. “In the long term it is important to change society to one in which women will want to give birth.”