한국 부인의 불임증실태에 관한 고찰

Study on The Infertility Rate of Korean Women

One of the primary objectives of Korean family planning program is to assist parents in having the number of children they want, both by providing fertility-en-hancing services to infecund and subfecund women and by providing fertility-limitation services to fecund women. As far as fertility-enhancing services to infecund and subfecund women is concerned, there has been little effort from the national family planning program, So far, there is no any basic data on infertility prevalence rate among the Korean women. Therefore, an attempt has been made to review data of 1976 and 1978 fertility and family planning surveys in order to estimate the level of infertility rate among the Korean women. In the 1978 survey 3. 7 percent of the current married women responded that they were physically infertile while in the 1976 survey physically infer-tile women was calculated as 3 percent of the total ever married women which is similar level of 1978 data of 3.7 percent. Mean age at first marriage of Korean women is 23 and most of the women are married in the high fecund age. Only 0.3 percent of the respondents married age 30. in addition, the rate of women with no children among the ever married women whose married duration is more than 5 year is very low;2. 5 percent among 5-9 years, 1. 4 percent among 10- 14 years; 1.8 precent among 15-19 years; 1.0 percent among 20-24 years; and 0. 7 percent among 25 or more years of marriage duration. If we consider those data shown above, it is manifest that infertility rate of Korean women is less than 5 percent level which is much lower than the 10 percent level of infertility rate in the United States of America. However, this kind of estimation is still not able to show definite data on fertility rate. Therefore, a nationwide planned survey should be carried out as early as possible to figure out the real situation of infertility rate in Korea.