KOREA TABOO ON ABORTION TO REMAIN
Women who undergo abortion will be ‘punished in the eyes of society’, claims activist
SOUTH KOREA is set to legalise abortion after a decades-long ban was struck down, but women’s rights campaigners have warned those who undergo the procedure will still be “punished in the eyes of society”.
In a landmark verdict last week, a South Korean court ruled the ban — which dates from 1953 — unconstitutional and asked the government to legalise abortion by the end of 2020.
Under the ban, as it currently stands, women who have abortions can be jailed for up to a year and get a fine, while doctors who perform the procedure at the woman’s request can face imprisonment
of up to two years.
The ruling was lauded as a victory for gender equality, but women’s rights activists said conservative values mean women — even doctors — would still face stigma, hampering access to abortion.
“Even if women are no longer criminals under the law for abortion, they will still be punished in the eyes of society,” Jiann Woo, who has organised protests against the ban since 2016, said.
“Abortion is still seen as immoral here — it is only something that the ‘single, naughty girls’ would do,” added the 25-year-old student, co-founder of Femidangdang, a Seoul-based women’s rights group.
The Roman Catholic Church, with five million adherents — out of a population of 51 million in South Korea — had taken a firm stance against the ruling.
“A nation has a responsibility to protect its people’s life and safety under any circumstances,” Seoul’s Roman Catholic Archbishop Andrew Yeom Soo-jung said, adding that he is “worried” over the ruling.
“Every life, from the moment of conception, should be protected as a human being,” he added in a statement.
South Korea became one of the last developed countries where abortion is a crime after Ireland voted in a referendum last year to overturn its highly restrictive abortion laws.
A survey by polling firm Realmeter this month showed more than 58 per cent of South Korean respondents favour scrapping the ban, but a little over 30 per cent wanted it retained.
Society’s traditional, patriarchal views on women and their sexuality are still deeply rooted in the East Asian country which ranked 115 out of 149 countries in the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Global Gender Gap report.
Abortion numbers have been dropping in South Korea, with nearly 50,000 estimated for women between 15 and 44 in 2017, down from some 340,000 in 2005, as birth control measures spread and the population of women in that age range falls, said the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs.
But campaigners say the ban has driven women to turn to black-market abortion drugs, and pushed the cost of surgical abortion prohibitively high with the fees for a late-term termination averaging about US$5,000 (RM21,000).
In many cases, women must also give a written promise that they will not implicate the doctor.
The constitutional court challenge stemmed from the case of a doctor who was charged with conducting nearly 70 illegal abortions.
Beyond the Catholic Church, some of the world’s largest megachurches and church-affiliated groups in South Korea have led the protest against making abortion legal.
The government has said it would respect the court’s decision and take steps to comply.
President Moon Jae-in, a Catholic and a liberal, has not stated clearly if he supports abortion, but has called for more discussions to build consensus.
Ryu Min-hee, a lawyer in the legal team that mounted the successful court challenge, said the onus is now on the government to ensure abortions are accessible to women and doctors are adequately trained.