Stock In Condom Manufacturers Soars After South Korea Decriminalizes Adultery

A South Korean court has overturned the conservative Asian nation’s decades-old adultery law, and stock prices in two of the nation’s largest condom manufacturers have risen sharply, Time is reporting.

Shares in the country’s largest condom manufacturer, Unidus Corp., rose 15 percent on the news – the largest single-day gain allowed by the country’s Kosdaq market, according to The Guardian. Also getting in on the action was Hyundai Pharmaceutical Co Ltd., according to Reuters. The company makes pregnancy tests and morning-after birth control pills.

Seo Ki-seok, a Constitutional Court judge, wrote on behalf of the majority of judges who ruled South Korea’s adultery law unconstitutional.

“The law is unconstitutional as it infringes people’s right to make their own decisions on sex and secrecy and freedom of their private life, violating the principle banning excessive enforcement.”

The country’s adultery laws date back to 1953, and were most recently upheld by South Korea’s Constitutional Court in 2008. At the time of the law’s passing, South Korea was largely agricultural, and women had few property rights. The adultery law was designed to protect women, who could be left destitute and unable to find employment if their husbands abandoned them.

In the 60 years since the law was originally passed, however, South Korea has become a modern and technologically-advanced, urbanized manufacturing center. Regardless, the nation maintains a conservative streak; supporters of the adultery law have maintained that it’s necessary to preserve traditional family values. Dissenting judge Ahn Chang-ho said in her opinion that overturning the adultery law would “spark a surge in debauchery.”

This is not the first time the use of condoms in a conservative Asian nation has made the news. In the days before Valentine’s Day, the government of Thailand made efforts to encourage teenage boys and young men to purchase the right-sized condoms; males there would often buy condoms that were too large for them, for fear of being looked down on by their peers for having a “small one,” as a Ministry of Health official put it.

Like Thailand, Korea, though deeply conservative in many ways, has a thriving prostitution industry, adultery laws aside. Prostitution occurs more-or-less openly, though illegally, in coffee shops, karaoke bars, and massage parlors, while police look the other way, according to International Business Times.

Although several hundred adultery complaints are filed each year in South Korea (892 in 2014), charges are almost always dropped, and offenders rarely face actual jail time.

[Images courtesy of: Getty Images/China Photos, Cracked]