Author: Choe Sang-Hun / Source: New York Times
Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
South Korea’s Constitutional Court on Thursday ruled as unconstitutional a 66-year-old law that made abortion a crime punishable by up to two years in prison, calling for an amendment to the law.
The court gave Parliament until the end of 2020 to revise the law.
If lawmakers do not meet that deadline, the law will become null and void. It currently remains in force.The verdict represented a landmark, if tentative, victory for abortion rights advocates, who have campaigned for the law’s abolition as a major step in bolstering women’s rights. Polls show that allowing abortion has broad support among South Korean women of childbearing age. In a government-financed survey of 10,000 women aged 15 to 44 last year, three-quarters called for liberalizing abortion regulations.
In its ruling, the court called the anti-abortion law “an unconstitutional restriction that violates a pregnant woman’s right to choose.” But it left it to Parliament to decide whether to restrict abortions in the late stages of a pregnancy.
In South Korea, abortion is widespread despite the ban, which allows exceptions such as in cases of rape or when a woman’s health is at risk. Under the country’s criminal code, a woman who undergoes an abortion can be punished with up to a year in prison or a fine of up to 2 million won, about $1,750. A doctor who performs an abortion faces up to two years in prison.
But the ban on abortion has rarely been enforced. In 2017 alone, 49,700 abortions took place, nearly 94 percent of them illegally, according to estimates released in February by the government-run Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs.
But between 2012 and 2017, just 80 women or doctors went to trial for their involvement in abortions and only one of them served time in prison, with the rest receiving fines or suspended jail terms, according to court data.Until recently, abortion carried little of the emotional or religious significance in South Korea that it does in many Western countries.
In the 1970s and 1980s, as the government struggled…
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