Pink or blue?

For years, doctors in South Korea have been legally barred from telling pregnant couples the gender of their unborn child. The reason was that too many couples hoping for a boy in male-dominated neo-Confucian Korean society would abort an unborn daughter and try again for a son. 

Such gender-selective abortion was the major factor in the gender imbalance that has plagued Korea until recently. At one point, the ratio of boys to girls was over 110 for every 100 girls (105 boys for every 100 girls is considered by demographers to be a "natural" ratio). 

Well, as the value of daughters has become higher (and why wouldn't it be when the lopsided gender ratio has allowed parents of daughters to dominate a seller's market?) and the demand for ridiculous amounts of "dowry" called honsu (혼수, 嫁資) has subsided (in part because men have more competition for fewer women), it is perceived that the need to protect unborn daughters from being aborted because of their gender has also subsided. 

But not completely, so doctors will be able to tell the future parents the gender of their child only after twenty-eight weeks, when it is illegal to get an abortion even in the limited cases where abortion is not legally proscribed. Of course, there may be ways around this law, just as there are with the ban both on abortion and on telling the parents the unborn child's gender. Supposedly one workaround for the latter is not to tell the parents what their child's gender is, but rather, what it isn't. Clever that.