South Korea Aborts 1.5 Million Unborns Yearly

Last week UCAN reported that at a March 15 press conference in Seoul Bishop John Chang Yik, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Korea (CBCK), released details of the Bishops' statement "Toward a Culture of Life."

Asia News yesterday released their report of the Bishops’ concerns.

In this statement the Korean Bishops have charged the government with destroying human dignity instead of promoting the culture of life.

"With government policy and laws destroying human dignity by prioritizing economic efficiency, we now face the sad reality of having the world's lowest birth rate, along with extremely high suicide and abortion rates."

Bishop Chang noted,

"According to media, an average of about 1.5 million abortions have taken place every year since 1973. If we add them all up, that exceeds the whole population of South Korea. It is that serious.”

A quick check on South Korea’s statistics showed it has a population of 48.8 million, about 1.5 times the population of Canada’s at 32.8 million. If the figure provided is accurate for the number of annual abortions in Korea, it is an horrific number, representing a full 3% yearly of the country’s total population. The culture of death surely has swept over South Korea.

To place it in a Canadian context, at the South Korean rate, it would equate to about 984,000 abortions annually in Canada! Canada currently records just over 100,000 abortions annually.

South Korea’s experiments on human embryonic stem cells, an issue that has recently emerged as a matter of grave concern on the international level, and its subsidies of IVF, in vitro fertilization, also came under attack from the Bishops.

The Bishop pointed out that many Catholics too have undergone abortions,

"swimming with others in society on the wave of the culture of death," because "Koreans value social success above all else and are ready to do so at the cost of others."

I applaud the Bishops on their public statement and I think it is an essential part of the task of Bishops to make known to their society the principles and teachings of the Church. However, one can’t help but ask whether the task of Bishops doesn’t go much further than this. In what sense was Jesus right when He said that His followers were to be the salt and light of the world, and that if the salt had lost its saltiness it was good for nothing but to be cast underfoot?

The Bishops admit that “Catholics” also swim with the rest of society “on the wave of the culture of death.” Isn’t it exactly at this point where the Bishops find their most crucial role, in the spiritual formation of the laity to be the salt and light of society? This sadly sounds like an admission of serious guilt and failure, despite the very good words of the document.

Words contained from time to time in a statement obviously haven’t been enough to save South Korea’s 1.5 million aborted unborns every year nor Canada’s 100,000 aborted unborns.

Society still desperately yearns for spiritual and moral leadership which can conquer the giants of sin in the land, first individually but ultimately nationally. Nothing less from the Church can glorify the one true God and Jesus Christ His Only Son, the Saviour of the world.

P.S. For the reader’s information, I was able to discover the following about South Korea’s religious makeup:

Half of the population actively practices religion. Among this group, Christianity (49%) and Buddhism (47%) comprise Korea’s two dominant religions. Though only 3% identified themselves as Confucianists, Korean society remains highly imbued with Confucian values and beliefs. The remaining 1% of the population practice Shamanism (traditional spirit worship) and Chondogyo ("Heavenly Way"), a traditional religion.