abortion operations were conducted in a year and unmarried women accounted for about 42%. However, it is estimated that the actual number of artificial abortions would be much larger: for instance, a Gallop poll estimated about 1,500,000 cases a year. 84. The key reason of the artificial abortions among the women between the ages of 2024 is pre-marital pregnancies, considering that the average female age of marriage in Korea (according to the Statistics Korea) is 28.3 as of 2008. The artificial abortions of this age group has a particularly close relation with the absence of the systematic social support for unmarried mothers and the lack of preventive services, including subsidized contraception. Indeed, given the large number of new unmarried mothers (2,000~3,500 a year, according to the Ministry of Health and Welfare) and the high rate of artificial abortions among unmarried women, which is severely undermining the reproductive right of women, it is urgent to design and provide specialized services on sexual and reproductive affairs, especially, for women in their early twenties. 85. The target groups of the Government's initiative to 'conduct research on the status of reproductive health and to develop and distribute assistance programs including education' are middle and high school students and married women, and the college students or the women within the labour market who are in their twenties are left outside the public system of sexual and reproductive services. As for the juvenile sex education, some progress has been made by local governments (the 'Resource Centre for Young Women' run by Seoul City and the 'Aha Sexuality Education & Counselling Centre for Youth') in developing sex education programs, training instructors of sex education and including requisite hours of sex education in the middle and high school curricular. Still, the women in their twenties remain as a blind spot, not being included from the coverage of the juvenile sex education policy. 86. In the current campaigns to prevent artificial abortions, the focus is usually given to the respect for life, rather than women's reproductive rights (the rights to healthy and safe pregnancy, childbirth and child rearing), mostly under the leadership of the religious community, resulting in a stronger sense of guilt on women's part. Accordingly, these campaigns need to be replaced with the ones about women's reproductive rights from a gender-sensitive perspective. 25