A recent government report showed it cost about 300 million won ($263,000) to raise a child through college in Korea. According to the report based on a 2012 survey of 18,000 households, an average of 1.19 million won a month was spent on raising each child, up from 748,000 won in 2003 and slightly over 1 million won in 2009.

Such an increase in the cost of raising a child has been cited as one of the major reasons for Korea’s low birth rate, which slipped to a record low of 1.08 per woman aged 15-49 in 2005 before edging up to 1.24 in 2011. Though Koreans are not known for their enthusiasm toward adoption, the rising costs have done little to discourage them from adopting children.

Korean children adopted by local families began outnumbering those sent for overseas adoption. The number of domestic adoptions increased from 1,306 in 2008 to 1,462 in 2010 and 1,548 in 2011 before declining to 1,125 last year, according to figures from the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

The sharp decrease followed the effectuation last August of the revised adoption law designed to protect adoptee rights more effectively. There were only 25 local adoptions in the last five months of 2012.

The revision has strengthened the adoption process, obliging a birth mother to go through a seven-day period of consideration before deciding whether to give up her baby and subjecting would-be adoptive parents to mandatory education on child rearing. While conceding its purposes are hardly refutable, some critics still note the revised law has failed to take actual conditions fully into account, inadvertently resulting in the sharp reduction in adoptions.

It would certainly be inappropriate for a child to be adopted without due checks on both birth and adoptive parents. But it would also be equally improper to put too many obstacles in the adoption process, which might not be in a child’s best interest.

The part of the revision particularly in need of reconsideration seems to be the clause that requires a single mother to register the birth of her baby before applying for a court adoption approval.

As the record of her motherhood will be deleted only after the adoption is actually made, many unwed mothers hesitate to go through the process out of fear that their identity may continue to remain open. Their concerns cannot be simply dismissed as oversensitive, considering there are usually an insufficient number of would-be adoptive parents. According to local agencies, more than 1,200 children are currently waiting to be adopted, with the number of couples who want to adopt remaining at about 300.

A worrying phenomenon that has entailed the revision of the law is the increase in the number of infants abandoned by their mothers. According to a child welfare center run by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, 69 babies were found abandoned across the city last year, up from 21 in 2010 and 31 in 2011. Of them, 41 were deserted in the five months since August when the revised law took effect. Most of the abandoned children might have been put up for adoption if the process had not been tightened under the amended law, critics note.

But advocates for adoptee rights have argued it is narrow-sighted to take issue with the measure just because of the decrease in adoptions. They say it is more important to help single mothers make a decision they will not regret later by letting them know about the government support and other means they may use to take care of their babies on their own.

Certainly, there was some need to improve the past practices, in which the adoption process was left to the hands of private agencies and children used to be adopted without the certificate of birth, making it virtually impossible for adoptive children to find their biological parents when they grew up.

But what has happened since the revision of the law seems to suggest the measure has outpaced what our society is prepared for. The amendment should have been preceded by more work toward establishing a social system that enables a single mother to raise her baby on her own, free of social prejudices.

It may be necessary to consider making some changes to the revised law to put it in line with social and institutional conditions.