Abortion in South Korea

A crowd at a landmark ruling
Protest sign
Constitutional Court of South Korea, 11 April 2019, 65-year-old-ban on abortion overturned.

Abortion in South Korea was decriminalized, effective 1 January 2021, by a 2019 order of the Constitutional Court of Korea. It is currently legal throughout pregnancy, as no new law has been enacted.[1] Thus there are no gestational limits or other restrictions.

From 1953 through 2020, abortion was illegal in most circumstances, but illegal abortions were widespread and commonly performed at hospitals and clinics.[2] On 11 April 2019, the Constitutional Court ruled the abortion ban unconstitutional and ordered the law's revision by the end of 2020.[3][4] Revisions to the law were proposed in October 2020, but not voted on by the deadline of 31 December 2020.[5]

The government of South Korea criminalized abortion in the 1953 Criminal Code in all circumstances. The law was amended by the Maternal and Child Health Law of 1973 to permit a physician to perform an abortion if the pregnant woman or her spouse has a certain hereditary or communicable diseases, if the pregnancy results from rape or incest, or if continuing the pregnancy would jeopardize the woman's health. Any physician who violated the law could be punished by two years' imprisonment. Self-induced abortions could be punished by a fine or imprisonment.[6][7]

The abortion law was not strongly enforced, especially during campaigns to lower South Korea's high fertility rate in the 1970s and 1980s. As the fertility rate dropped in the 2000s, the government and anti-abortion campaigners turned their attention to illegal abortions[8][7] and the government stepped up enforcement of the abortion law in response.[9]

Sex-selective abortion, attributed to a cultural preference for sons, was common until the early 1990s but today has all but disappeared.[8] Despite a 1987 revision of the Medical Code prohibiting physicians from using prenatal testing to reveal the sex of the child, the ratio of boys to girls at birth continued to climb into the early the 1990s, but the trend has reversed ever since. The 1987 law was ruled unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court in 2008.[10]

  1. ^ Kim, Sunhye (2023-02-07). "From Population Control to Reproductive Justice: Decriminalization of Abortion in South Korea". Verfassungsblog.
  2. ^ "How to make abortion rarer". The Economist. 3 December 2016. Retrieved 25 December 2017.
  3. ^ "S Korea must end abortion ban - court". BBC News. 2019-04-11. Retrieved 2019-04-11.
  4. ^ Case 2017-127. Text: https://ecourt.ccourt.go.kr/coelec/websquare/websquare.html?w2xPath=/ui/coelec/dta/casesrch/EP4100_M01.xml&eventno=2017%ED%97%8C%EB%B0%94127
  5. ^ Murray, Christine; Chandran, Rina (31 December 2020). "From Poland to South Korea: 9 abortion rights hotspots in 2021". Thomson Reuters Foundation. Retrieved 1 January 2021.
  6. ^ "Republic of Korea". Abortion Policies: A Global Review (DOC). Vol. 2. United Nations Population Division. 2002. Retrieved 25 December 2017.
  7. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference sung2012 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ a b Choe, Sang-Hun (5 January 2010). "South Korea Confronts Open Secret of Abortion". The New York Times. Retrieved 25 December 2017.
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference economist2017 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^ Cite error: The named reference wolman2010 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).