Canadian-based abortion activist group Women on Web recently lost its appeal to a South Korean court after it sued to have the country unblock access to its website.
The Korea Communications Standards Commission blocked access to the site in 2019, stating that it violated the country’s Pharmaceutical Affairs Act by providing abortion drugs to women in the country from pharmacists outside of the country. Neither the abortion pill mifepristone, nor its counterpart misoprostol, is legal in South Korea.
According to Korean news site Hankyoreh, Women on Web objected to their website being blocked, stating that they provide WHO-approved abortion pills, including in “emergency” cases allowed in the current statutes. However, the appeals court’s ruling upheld an earlier court’s decision to allow the government to block the site in South Korea on the basis that, because other means of abortion are available to women, providing abortion pills did not constitute an emergency.
Women on Web is an international abortion business founded by Dutch abortion activist, Dr. Rebecca Gomperts. Its mission is to push abortion wherever and however it can, even across international borders, most recently via the abortion pill. The site’s tagline, “abortion pill access by mail,” encapsulates the profiteering group’s reckless efforts to push the abortion pill while downplaying the risks, despite the clear dangers to women. The group’s mission calls abortion, the deliberate ending of a human life, as “essential health care and a fundamental human right,” and baselessly calls any pro-life protections “scientifically unsound and harmful.”
READ: In promoting illegal abortion pill websites, media plays Russian roulette with women’s lives
Since 2019, South Korea has been in a legal gray area regarding its abortion laws. That year saw the overturning of a law from the end of the 1953 Korean War that outlawed most abortions, in part as a response to the population decline on account of the war. When the country’s Constitutional Court vacated the law, it removed the penalties for those who obtained or provided an abortion, leaving in place other statutes that “limit” abortions to cases of rape, incest, disability, or health of the mother. Induced abortion is the intentional and direct killing of a preborn human being, and therefore is not healthcare and is not medically necessary.
The court instructed the legislature to revise the abortion statutes in 2020. However, that never happened, despite a push to make abortion fully legal on demand until 14 weeks – or 24 weeks for certain medical conditions. The law expired on January 1, 2021. This means that abortion is currently decriminalized, though not technically fully legal in the country, and preborn children have no legal protections.
South Korea is no stranger to birth control and sterilization, as it is currently facing a severe population decline due to an aggressive campaign promoting both in the 1970s and 80s. During that time, even though abortion was illegal in the country, it was often illegally encouraged, and was sometimes forced upon single mothers and women with disabilities. In fact, abortion was so widely accepted and committed in the country that it wasn’t flagged as a target for international abortion groups until the country began to enforce its already existing laws banning abortion in the mid-2000s. This eventually gave rise to the prosecution of an abortion, which turned into the case before the country’s high court.
According to government reports, since the decriminalization of abortion in the country, the number of abortions increased from 4,800 in 2017 to 32,000 in 2020.
Women on Web is likely to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, according to Hankyoreh.
