A South Korean vlogger who claimed to have terminated her being pregnant at 36 weeks is being investigated for homicide in a case that’s prompted horror in South Korea and raised pressing questions on why the nation has no abortion legal guidelines.
Seoul National Police started investigating the lady in July on the request of the South Korean authorities, after she posted a video to YouTube purportedly documenting her expertise of getting an abortion, police informed CNN.
Abortions previous 24 weeks are banned in lots of jurisdictions, or reserved for very distinctive instances, corresponding to fetal anomalies or when the mom’s well being is in danger.
But in South Korea, there aren’t any legal guidelines governing when, the place or how abortions can happen – and there haven’t been for nearly 4 years.
It’s a coverage vacuum that specialists say not solely opens the door to potential malpractice but in addition hinders entry to protected abortions, with girls and medical doctors compelled to navigate a state of authorized uncertainty.
In a joint assertion, a coalition of 11 South Korean girls’s organizations and NGOs slammed the federal government for pursuing girls who terminate pregnancies moderately than bettering entry to abortion care.
“This is nothing in need of a pathetic and severe try to evade duty and shift blame,” the assertion mentioned.
A authorized gap
For greater than six a long time, performing an abortion in South Korea was against the law punishable by as much as two years in jail, with restricted exceptions for rape, incest, and risk to the well being of the mom or the newborn.
Pregnant girls who selected to terminate may be jailed for as much as one yr.
But in 2019, South Korea’s Constitutional Court overturned that ban, giving the National Assembly till the top of 2020 to enact new abortion legal guidelines, which the court docket really useful ought to embrace a time period restrict of twenty-two weeks.
When the legislature failed to fulfill that deadline, the legal provisions round abortion expired, successfully legalizing abortion at any stage of being pregnant.
By not passing abortion legal guidelines, the National Assembly is “not doing its job,” mentioned Cho Hee-kyoung, a regulation professor at Hongik University in Seoul.
“If there isn’t any regulation criminalizing a conduct, then there isn’t any crime for finishing up that conduct,” Cho mentioned.
Decriminalization of abortion was a significant win for reproductive rights advocates, who on the time confronted stern opposition from conservative and non secular teams, some linked to US anti-abortion campaigns.
But their victory has been dampened by what’s come – or hasn’t come – within the years since.
“Since the criminality of abortion was banned, we have now been asking the well being and welfare ministry to categorise abortion with no consideration of well being, not as a topic of punishment, and to provide you with insurance policies,” mentioned Nayoung, a consultant for SHARE, a company in South Korea that gives providers associated to sexual and reproductive well being and rights.
But no new insurance policies have handed. Instead, debates within the National Assembly about abortion insurance policies have confronted renewed opposition from non secular teams, which maintain highly effective sway with lawmakers in a rustic the place conventional gender norms dominate.
In a press release posted to its web site in June, the nation’s Ministry of Justice mentioned “the route, particulars, and timing of the revision” of abortion legal guidelines haven’t but been determined, and that it must seek the advice of with the Health and Welfare Ministry, which oversees the Maternal and Child Health Act.
“The Ministry of Justice will do its finest to debate the problem in order that the fitting to lifetime of the fetus, and the fitting to well being and the fitting to self-determination of the pregnant girl will be harmonized,” the assertion added.
The Health and Welfare Ministry informed CNN that it’ll “actively help the legislative course of” with the present National Assembly, as proposed revisions had all expired with the top of the earlier parliament time period in May.
Changing attitudes to abortion
Despite the nation beforehand having extremely restrictive abortion legal guidelines, abortion has not traditionally been the lightning rod in South Korea that it has been within the United States.
Between the Sixties and the mid-2000s, the South Korean authorities strongly emphasised household planning to curb inhabitants development, to the purpose that abortion was seen as an “different methodology of contraception,” mentioned Cho, the regulation professor.
Social stigma positioned upon single and unwed moms additionally facilitated the hushed acceptance of abortion, she mentioned. “Even cops and their wives, prosecutors and their wives and mistresses, had been getting abortions.”
While abortion has lengthy been allowed to function within the shadows, authorities started cracking down on the process within the mid-2000s.
Doctors had been charged with performing abortions, prompting a court docket problem that sought to safeguard the rights of girls to hunt an abortion and for medical doctors to supply them.
At the identical time, South Korea’s delivery price was dropping and the federal government was searching for methods to spice up the inhabitants. Along with new types of contraception that would stop pregnancies, the general public temper in the direction of abortion shifted, in line with Cho.
“It’s not one thing that folks take flippantly, and folks would possibly are inclined to see it as being considerably irresponsible,” she mentioned.
If overpopulation had as soon as prompted the federal government to push abortions, South Korea was now coping with the other downside.
South Korea’s fertility price was 0.72 kids per girl in 2023, in line with government figures, far under the two.1 price the OECD estimates a rustic wants to realize inhabitants stability with out immigration. By comparability, the fertility price within the US was 1.7 in 2022, in line with the World Bank.
Fertility charges under 1.5 can plunge international locations right into a lure the place low fertility drives inhabitants ageing and financial stagnation – additional deterring childbearing and driving the fertility price decrease.
It is not possible to know the true variety of abortions that happen annually in South Korea as a result of the process is unregulated.
There’s no dependable historic comparability as a result of again when abortion was nonetheless against the law, sufferers would pay hospitals in money so there was no official report, mentioned Nayoung, from SHARE.
But in line with estimates from South Korea’s Institute for Health and Social Affairs, the variety of abortions has fallen drastically in current a long time, from an estimated 241,411 in 2008 to simply 32,063 in 2020, the final yr for which statistics can be found.
Advocates say the true abortion price is probably going a lot greater.
Abortion drugs banned
In the absence of clear rules, girls and abortion suppliers at present function in a grey space with little steerage as to what’s permitted and what would possibly break different legal guidelines.
Credible details about the place to get an abortion is difficult to come back by, and the process shouldn’t be lined underneath the nation’s public well being system.
Often, girls will depend on phrase of mouth to discover a clinic that can carry out an abortion, at a price of lots of of {dollars} that they need to pay out of pocket, mentioned Susanné Seong-eun Bergsten, an officer within the girls’s rights division for Human Rights Watch.
“Women are actually struggling,” mentioned Bergsten. “They’ve been ready for 5 years for one thing to vary.”
While surgical abortion is now technically authorized, abortion treatment – which affords a protected, inexpensive and efficient method to terminate a being pregnant in its early phases – shouldn’t be, underscoring the issue girls in South Korea nonetheless face in exercising their reproductive rights.
In May, a South Korean court docket rejected an attraction by Women on Web (WoW), a Canadian NGO that delivers abortion drugs by mail, and digital rights group Open Net Korea, to open entry to the WoW web site, which has been blocked in South Korea since 2019.
Access to the WoW web site was blocked on the order of Korea’s Communication Standards Committee, which oversees broadcasting content material and the web, for violating the Pharmaceutical Affairs Act by promoting the abortion-inducing tablet mifepristone, the committee informed CNN.
Mifepristone blocks the progesterone hormone wanted for a being pregnant to proceed. When taken with one other drug referred to as misoprostol, it may well finish a being pregnant as much as 10 weeks. Both medicines are on the World Health Organization’s record of important medicines.
WoW has filed a closing attraction to the Supreme Court.
“By blocking the web site of such a company, the federal government is moderately creating an surroundings the place folks must search for unofficial and unsafe drugs,” Nayoung mentioned.
No medication to terminate pregnancies are permitted to be used in South Korea, and the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety informed CNN none are being reviewed for potential sale.
In their assertion, the 11 girls’s organizations and NGOs mentioned abortion drugs had been predominantly accessible on the black market.
“At this level, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the federal government has really deepened the circumstances that result in extra late-term being pregnant terminations and nameless births,” the assertion mentioned.
Entrenched gender norms
While South Korea has carried out little to help girls who need to finish their pregnancies, the federal government has added new helps to encourage pregnant girls to hold their infants to time period.
In July, South Korea started providing counseling providers to pregnant girls and new moms experiencing financial, bodily and psychological difficulties.
In a current report, the federal government cited what it mentioned had been a number of success tales together with the case of a girl who determined to not have an abortion after studying of the added help accessible to her.
Advocates are skeptical that extra liberal abortion legal guidelines will go quickly, due to society’s angle in the direction of girls.
South Korea has the worst gender wage gap within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and has bottomed out the Economist’s glass ceiling index, which measures the function and affect of girls within the work power, for greater than a decade.
The nation’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was elected two years in the past pledging to abolish the country’s gender equality ministry, and courts help from young anti-feminist men.
“(Women) are nonetheless seen as the primary caretakers of the house, of the youngsters,” Bergsten, from HRW, mentioned.
“It’s a really previous type of gender stereotype that’s nonetheless going very sturdy in South Korea.”
It’s unclear what motivated the YouTuber to submit about her expertise on-line.
Police informed CNN they analyzed the video to trace down the lady, who’s in her 20s, and the hospital allegedly concerned within the process.
The physician who allegedly carried out the abortion was an obstetrician introduced in from one other hospital, police informed CNN-affiliate YTN, including that the unnamed hospital initially falsely mentioned it was one among their very own medical doctors.
Along with the lady and the physician, police are investigating not less than 5 different medical workers who allegedly participated within the abortion, and a dealer, YTN reported.
Police informed CNN the lady’s hospital report mentioned the newborn was stillborn, however that she’d additionally admitted to getting an abortion.
If there’s sufficient proof to show the newborn was born alive, the lady could possibly be charged with homicide, mentioned Cho, the regulation professor. Police should discover proof of different crimes, past abortion, to put expenses on this case, she added.
“I believe it’s troublesome to prosecute both physician or the lady for abortion as a result of the crime of abortion doesn’t exist anymore.”
