조선시대 출산에 대한 인식과 실제

Abstract

I studied various thoughts of pregnancy and birth, ages of giving a baby, number of children and death at the Joseon Dynasty. As a result, we could find the facts that Joseon Dynasty made much importance of pregnancy and birth, but did not justified to cut off the opportunities of having birth like contraception, abortion or the activities like artificial miscarriage. I studied that Joseon demanded strongly the birth with reinforcement of the thought of their family lines as well as they emphasized the marriage and the birth on base of the thought of life respect like confucianism. Moreover, Joseon government had an interest to the birth on dimension to get the labor power because of being agricultural country, so they tried to promote women to get married and to protect the safety of pregnant women to deliver baby and embryos. These kinds of attitudes and thoughts about pregnancy and birth resulted in controlling birth and contraception, negatively thinking the abortion. But they accepted contraception and abortion within the restricted range conservatively. So we could find that there was the limit of government's intervention when we study the government did not prepare the regulation of penalty for artificial abortion. And after studying the women's birth actually, we could know that women got married at age from 16c to 17c, got pregnancy and had babies repeatedly after marriage. So they could have about eight or nine children for 30 years which could be pregnancy. But actually only about 4 children could be survived among their children. The main reason for those low existence rates was women fatality during delivering baby and infant mortality.