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<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto">
<b><i><span lang="EN" style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:#121212">South Korea Rules Anti-Abortion Law Unconstitutional
<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:#333333"><img width="600" height="400" id="Picture_x0020_1" src="cid:image001.jpg@01D4F908.FF3672C0" alt="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/04/11/world/11koea-abortion-1sub/merlin_140901465_684100dd-5169-4dd7-b37c-267012cfd526-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale"></span><span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:#333333"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:#333333"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#666666">A protest against South Korean abortion laws in Seoul, the capital, last year.</span><span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333;border:none windowtext 1.0pt;padding:0in">CreditCredit</span><span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">Ed
Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#121212;letter-spacing:.25pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#121212;letter-spacing:.25pt">By
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/choe-sang-hun"><span style="color:#333333;text-decoration:none">Choe Sang-Hun</span></a> – April 11, 2019<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">The court gave Parliament until the end of 2020 to revise the law. If legislators do not meet that deadline, the law will become null and void. It currently remains in force.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">Polls show that allowing abortion has broad support among South Korean women of childbearing age. In a government-financed survey of 10,000 women ages 15 to 44 last year,
three-quarters called for liberalizing abortion regulations.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">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. 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">Until recently, abortion carried little of the emotional or religious significance in South Korea that it does in many Western countries.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">In the 1970s and 1980s, as the government struggled to curtail population growth, it told families that “two children are one too many” and looked the other way as abortions
became widespread.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">In more recent years, however, the country has tried to reverse its falling birthrate, which is one of the lowest in the world, with an average of less than one child per
woman. The government’s attitude toward abortion has also shifted, with officials often calling it unpatriotic and threatening to crack down on the procedure.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">Women’s rights groups
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/world/asia/south-korea-abortion-ban.html?module=inline">
<span style="color:#326891;text-decoration:none">have recently started to push back</span></a> against what they called the government’s tendency to regulate a woman’s right to choose.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">“When there were too many people, they told us ‘not to produce babies’ in the name of family planning, and when they thought there were not enough people, they then told
us ‘to produce babies’ or face punishment,” a coalition of women’s groups campaigning for abortion rights said in a statement in February. “We can no longer put up with this deceitful frame.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">At the same time, some obstetricians and Christian activists have
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/world/asia/06korea.html?module=inline">
<span style="color:#326891;text-decoration:none">pushed a morality-based campaign</span></a> against abortion in recent years, running a hotline for people to report doctors who perform illegal abortions.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">Last week, Cardinal Andrew Yeom Soo-jung, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Seoul, the capital, repeated his church’s opposition to repealing the anti-abortion law, calling
on South Korea to “protect women and fetuses from abortion.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">But both camps were on the same page in denouncing the hypocrisy of having a rarely enforced abortion ban on the books while the procedure remains widespread.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">“The ruling marks an important stride in strengthening gender equality and women’s right to make choices for themselves,” a civic group, People’s Solidarity for Participatory
Democracy, said Thursday in a statement.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Korea said that it “deeply deplores” the court’s decision. “It denies a fetus its basic right to life,” the group said in a statement.
“Abortion is the crime of killing an innocent life during pregnancy.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">In 2012, the last time it ruled on the issue, the Constitutional Court found the anti-abortion law to be constitutional, recognizing a fetus’s right to life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">The number of abortions has been dropping in South Korea, from 342,000 in 2005 to 49,700 in 2017 among women of the same age group, according to estimates from the Korea
Institute for Health and Social Affairs. A majority of women surveyed by the institute said they chose abortions because they feared that raising children would interrupt their educational pursuits or professional careers or because they did not have enough
money to raise children.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">The institute attributed the drop in abortions to the declining number of childbearing-age women and the increasing use of contraception. But doctors and experts have said
that the actual number of abortions could be much larger than the official estimates.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">The office of President Moon Jae-in had no immediate reaction to the court’s ruling on Thursday.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">The government’s Ministry of Gender Equality and Family had called for the abolition of the anti-abortion law, which it called a “dead document” because it had seldom been
enforced. They said the law had forced abortions underground, exposing women to medical accidents.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:15.0pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;margin-left:15.0pt">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma",sans-serif;color:#333333">The Ministry of Justice has defended the ban on abortions, saying, “It is the state’s duty to protect a fetus’s right to life.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/world/asia/south-korea-abortion-ban-ruling.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/world/asia/south-korea-abortion-ban-ruling.html</a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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