South Korea court strikes down law criminalizing abortion in landmark ruling
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In a landmark ruling on Thursday South Korea’s Constitutional Court overturned a ban on abortion that has stood for more than 65 years, saying the current law unconstitutionally limits women’s rights.

The court said in a statement the outright ban on abortion, as well as a law that made doctors who conduct abortions with the woman’s consent liable to criminal charges, were both unconstitutional.

“The law criminalizing a woman who undergoes abortion of her own will goes beyond the minimum needed to achieve the legislative purpose and limits the right of self-determination of the woman who has become pregnant,” the court said in its ruling.

Seven of the court’s nine justices ruled the law unconstitutional, while two dissented.

In 2012 the law survived a previous challenge when the court was split evenly, four to four, with one seat unfilled at the time.

A survey by polling firm Realmeter last week found that more than 58 percent of South Korean respondents favored scrapping the ban, while a little over 30 percent wanted to keep it.

“I believe this ruling frees women from one shackle that had been suffocating them,” said Kim Su-jung, a lawyer representing the plaintiff, a doctor who was charged under the law with conducting 69 illegal abortions.

The court’s ruling reflects the trend toward decriminalizing abortion, with the number of actual cases where abortion was criminally punished falling in recent years.

Only eight new cases of illegal abortion were prosecuted in 2017, down from 24 in 2016, according to South Korean judicial data. Out of the 14 abortion cases that were decided in lower courts in 2017, 10 postponed a ruling on condition that no crime be committed for a certain period.

The number of abortions in South Korea has been dropping as well, with the estimated number of abortions among women aged 15 to 44 at 49,764 in 2017, down from 342,433 in 2005 and 168,738 in 2010, due to increased use of birth control and a drop in the total number of women in that age range, according to the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs.