Intimate Mediators: Field Workers in the National Family Planning Program, South Korea, 1960–1980s

This paper examines family planning (FP) workers implementing the national family planning program (FPP) in South Korea between the 1960s and 1980s. Despite recent reconsiderations of local actors in Asia in the global population control movement, they have hardly been discussed as a significant actor group. In order to highlight them, this paper investigates how FP workers engaged in the FPP with their own motivations in the socioeconomic context surrounding them. At the same time, this paper regards them as mediators. The experts and bureaucrats involved in the FPP assigned them the role of mere suppliers or intermediaries who would convey contraceptive knowledge and devices to willing couples for FP. However, FP workers encountered unforeseen obstacles between themselves and the potential users, and between the users and actual contraceptive practices. The obstacles included distrust of young single women who attempted to intervene in their intimate lives; antipathy toward family planning among the elderly; concerns about the side effects of new contraceptives; and the reluctance of women to expose their bodies in front of male physicians. The workers overcame these obstacles by transforming, translating, distorting, and modifying what they had initially been expected to convey.