Calls to end South Korea abortion ban reach top court

SEOUL: A decades-old abortion ban that activists say endangers women - even if it is only sporadically enforced - will be challenged in South Korea’s supreme court this week. Along with Ireland, which holds a referendum on reforming strict abortion laws on Friday, South Korea is one of the few industrialized nations where the procedure is illegal except for instances of rape, incest and when the mother’s health is at risk. Women who terminate a pregnancy face a fine and a year in jail, while doctors who carry out terminations can get up to two years behind bars. In reality, the 1953 law rarely results in prosecutions. But there are growing calls for change as activists argue criminalization leaves women vulnerable to unsafe procedures and the changing whims of politicians as well as blackmail from their partners. “It’s anachronistic,” Kim Dong-sik, a researcher at the staterun Korean Women’s Development Institute, told AFP. “We are still stuck in 1953.” Calls to repeal the law have gained traction in recent years with more than 230,000 people signing a petition to legalize abortion last year. On Thursday the Constitutional Court is due to review a challenge from a doctor who was prosecuted for performing nearly 70 abortions. But opposition is staunch in a country that remains conservative towards female sexuality and highly influenced by evangelical Christianity.

Historically, enforcement of the law has been patchy as South Korea morphed from an impoverished nation to one of Asia’s wealthiest economies. “The country has a history of tacitly encouraging abortion and contraception when it needs to reduce population, and when low birthrate became an issue, it clamped down on abortion,” said Jay Kim, from the non-profit advocacy group Womenlink. In the 1960s when South Korea was poorer, Kim said, abortion buses roamed the streets as authorities fretted about overpopulation and pushed a semiofficial “one child per family” policy.—AFP