Korea decriminalized abortion 7 years ago. For many women, it remains a dangerous choice.

The Hankyoreh reviewed years’ worth of court cases to understand how the failure to enshrine the right to abortion in law and normalize it as standard health care has affected Korean women who chose to terminate their pregnancies

April 13, 2026

Min-ji underwent two abortions while in a relationship with Young-ho in 2020 and 2021. The decision to terminate the pregnancies was reached by mutual consent. However, after the couple split, Young-ho changed drastically, going so far as to plaster Min-ji’s workplace with posters that accused her of being a “murderer who killed two children.”

After having an abortion in January 2022, Ye-eun refused to engage in sexual relations with her partner, Cheol-su, only for him to threaten to notify her family and her school of her past pregnancy.

Continued: https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/1253991.html

India – “Female fetuses used to be discarded in wells”

Hollie McKay
Oct 13, 2025

It’s easy to fall into a guilted love with India. Arundhati Roy wrote that it is a country that “lives in several centuries at a time.” It’s the world’s most populace place spanning Bollywood to beggars, vibrant temples and pulsating clubs and silent ashrams tucked away by the snow-veiled mountains of the Himalayas.

It’s a place where I can walk into the most magnificent sari store, where the wild silks are sourced from West Bengal and each pleat is tailored to size, and walk out to see the bare bottom of a bone-thin child bathing beside his mother in a dirty park pond.

Continued: https://holliesmckay.substack.com/p/female-fetuses-used-to-be-discarded

13.10.2025

Pre-Conception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques Act

Ruby Singh

sex selection

sex selective abortion

Anti-abortion group’s ‘baby box’ stirs Croatia row

Zagreb (AFP) – A "baby box" for abandoned newborns has sparked a row in staunchly Catholic Croatia with women's rights groups calling for its removal, saying it is an illegal "Trojan horse" for anti-abortion campaigners.

25/03/2025

The modern form of the medieval "foundling wheel" -- where unwanted babies were left at churches -- was built into a convent wall in February in a quiet Zagreb neighbourhood.

Motion sensors set off an alarm on the mobile phones of the nuns inside and of a Catholic anti-abortion group when the hatch is opened.

Continued: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250325-anti-abortion-group-s-baby-box-stirs-croatia-row

Birth Control and Abortion in the Middle Ages

Birth control and abortion did take place in the Middle Ages and, like today, there were many medical and ethical issues that medieval people had to contend with.

Feb 18, 2024
Medievalists.net

In the Middle Ages you will find many opinions about what should or shouldn’t be done when it came to preventing pregnancies. However, the medieval period might be unique in that it is perhaps the only time when you can read the same author in one work condemning the use of birth control and in another giving directions on how to use it.

Religious values held the most important influence on the use of birth control, before and after one conceives. Taking their cue from the Biblical commandment to “Be fruitful, and multiply,” medieval Christianity saw the sole purpose of sex as a means to conceive children. Therefore, the idea that one could use birth control to stop conception was usually harshly condemned (and often equated as being the same as abortion). One ninth-century text, explains, “a woman who has taken a magic potion, however many times she would otherwise have become pregnant and given birth, must recognize herself to be guilty of homicide.”

Continued: https://www.medievalists.net/2024/02/birth-control-abortion-middle-ages/

18.02.2024

Commentary

abortion in the Middle Ages

Birth-Control in the West in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries

concealment of pregnancy

Etienne Van de Walle

history of abortion

history of contraception

infanticide

Leon Battista Alberti

Pete Billar

The Criminalization of Abortion in the West: Its Origins in Medieval Law

Wolfgang Muller

Global

Contraception

The Tragedy of the Unwanted Child: What Ancient Cultures Did Before Abortion

Safe abortion is the modern cure for the ancient heartbreaks of neonaticide and abandonment.

Rob Brooks
24 Jun 2022

Talk about abortion is dominating the US culture wars, again. A leaked US Supreme Court majority opinion foreshadows the overturning of 1973’s Roe vs. Wade decision protecting a woman’s liberty to terminate a pregnancy without excessive government restriction, sparking joy among anti-abortion campaigners and dread among choice advocates. Anyone naive to the last 50 years of abortion politics might think the sides are concerned with two entirely different phenomena. One advocates a woman’s right to reproductive and bodily autonomy, whereas the other condemns what it considers to be a form of homicide.

Many
self-declared “pro-lifers” consider the termination of a pregnancy the moral
equivalent of taking a newborn life. Their strategies, including the endless
debates over when a fetus becomes viable, seek to blur distinctions between
aborting a fetus and killing a newborn child. So much so that few on the
pro-choice side welcome discussion about the relationship between abortion and
infanticide. I argue here that an understanding of that relationship—drawing on
evidence from centuries of history and millennia of evolution—leads to the
conclusion that abortion is the most humane alternative to infanticide, adding
to the case for safe, legal, accessible abortion for women who need it.

Continued: https://quillette.com/2022/06/24/the-tragedy-of-the-unwanted-child-what-ancient-cultures-did-before-abortion/

24.06.2022

Japan – Calls for Support During Unintended Pregnancies

June 8, 2021
Video: 3:36 minutes

Unintended pregnancies often force women to
make hard choices under pressure. Every year, in extreme cases, they even
result in the deaths of unplanned children. Shirai Chiaki, a professor at
Shizuoka University, says it's time for Japanese society to build a new
consensus that supports women through potentially life-changing decisions.

Continued: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/videos/20210608133815578/

08.06.2021

News

Videos/Images

emergency contraception

infanticide

partner permission for abortion

Shirai Chiaki

spousal permission for abortion

Halting Spate of Abandoned Babies In Nigeria

Nov 15, 2020
BY THE SOCIETY FOR MEDIA ADVOCACY ON HEALTH, Nigeria

Stories about babies abandoned by their mothers across many Nigerian states have been rocking the media in recent times, unlike two decades ago. For instance, reports have it that over 237 abandoned babies were rescued across Lagos State in the past six years. One of the babies was a three-months-old, found inside a plastic bag in the Abule Egba a suburb of the state. What about the pathetic mother who gave birth in a toilet and then tried to flush her baby in the state, just recently.

In Abia state, a one month old baby was recently found in a pit latrine and was later rescued by the police. Also, in Jigawa State, the story of a 23-year-old woman who dumped her newborn baby in Dutse local government area trended while in Ogun State, a baby who still had his placenta uncut was abandoned by his mother.

Continued: https://leadership.ng/halting-spate-of-abandoned-babies-in-nigeria/

15.11.2020

Society for Media Advocacy on Health

youth-friendly family planning services

Africa

Nigeria

Health

China – Xinjiang Hospitals Aborted, Killed Babies Outside Family Planning Limits: Uyghur Obstetrician

2020-08-17
Radio Free Asia

Hospitals in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) were forced to abort and kill babies born in excess of family planning limits or who were in utero less than three years after the mother’s previous birth, according to a Uyghur obstetrician and other sources.

Hasiyet Abdulla, who currently lives in Turkey, worked in multiple hospitals in Xinjiang over the course of 15 years, including the XUAR Hospital of Traditional Uyghur Medicine.

Continued: https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/abortions-08172020144036.html

Women in North Korea’s Detention Centers Face Sexual Abuse: UN Report

by Anya Ruppert
July 28, 2020

A report released by the UN Tuesday revealed North Korean women undergo forced labor, sexual violence, and forced abortion and infanticide in the country’s detention centers.

The report acknowledges that “over seventy years since its establishment, [North Korea] remains a closed society and leaving the country without official permission is a crime under domestic law.” However, women who manage to escape and then forcibly return or fail to flee, face extraneous inhumane punishments.

Continued: https://theglobepost.com/2020/07/28/north-korea-women/

28.07.2020

Featured

News

anti-choice atrocities

coerced abortion

Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women

A heartbreaking sign of Venezuela’s deepening child welfare crisis

Baranyai: A heartbreaking sign of Venezuela's deepening child welfare crisis

Robin Baranyai, Special to Postmedia News
Updated: March 6, 2020

The graphic is straightforward but shocking: a red circle crossed through with a line — the universal symbol for nope — imposed over a stick figure standing next to a trash bin. Dangling upside down above the garbage is a small stick figure in a diaper.

“Prohibido botar beb(C)s,” the text reads: “Dumping babies is forbidden.”

Continued: https://lfpress.com/opinion/columnists/baranyai-a-heartbreaking-sign-of-venezuelas-deepening-child-welfare-crisis

06.03.2020