ICWRSA News. https://www.safeabortionwomensright.org/news/south-korea-
the-government-is-still-blocking-legalisation-of-abortion/, 17 August 2022
South Korean police said Monday they were investigating a YouTube video of a woman who “vlogged” in June this year about undergoing an abortion in her 36th week of pregnancy, saying she had only discovered she was pregnant very late in the process. The statement apparently sparked online outrage and calls from the country’s Health Ministry for a murder probe. The woman’s identity was withheld by police.
The footage was later deleted, but it had quickly gone viral in South Korea, with screenshots from it still circulating widely online. “We have booked the woman and the head of the clinic had that performed the procedure as suspects,” a representative of the Seoul Police Agency told Agence France Presse.
The police confirmed the footage was genuine, saying they had identified the clinic where the procedure was performed through an analysis of the video. They are investigating exactly what happened, a police official said, according to the Yonhap News Agency, adding that the probe could implicate more people.
Until 2019, South Korea was one of just a handful of industrialised nations that broadly criminalised abortion, except in instances of rape, incest and when the woman’s health was in jeopardy.
But five years ago, the Constitutional Court ordered the decades-old ban lifted, ruling that the 1953 statute “goes against the constitution”. The Court ordered the law to be revised by the end of 2020 but it has not yet been done. As a result of the legal vacuum, there is technically no time limit on late abortions, but the police are claiming authority to investigate.
South Korea has been in ICWRSA’s international news reports about abortion law reform since 2016. We have published the following articles since then, written by and based on the activities of Joint Action for Reproductive Justice, a member of the Campaign. See the following reports from them, that show how they have campaigned and made this issue a national news item ever since:
2023: https://www.safeabortionwomensright.org/news/south-korea-decriminalised-but-not-legal/
A Google search shows that the story is currently being carried by a number of South Korean media.
A recent report in the Korean Times says: “There is some speculation that it may all have been made up in order to gain attention and make money out of the clicks.” But meanwhile, it is being taken very seriously.
We await the facts…
SOURCE: Barron’s, by AFP. 12 August 2024. © Agence France Presse. Barron’s, an online magazine about finance and markets, published this article in their web news pages, but then claim at the end: “The Barron’s news department was not involved in the creation of the content above. This article was produced by AFP. For more information go to AFP.” Odd that AFP did not get more information about the reasons for such a late abortion, if it was indeed true, nor what the outcome of the police investigation was before publishing the article.