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Asia

Illegal abortion, South Korea’s open secret

April 4, 2008
Lee Jiyeon, Reuters

At a clinic in a fashionable area of Seoul, young women sit in plush leather couches waiting for a doctor to give them an illegal abortion.

By the hundreds of thousands each year South Korean women have gone to clinics like this, which operate in the open.

Abortions have been illegal for almost as long as South Korea has existed but, in an uneasy compromise, law enforcement officials have been willing to look the other way as long as qualified doctors perform the operation.

Many public health experts in South Korea are pushing for changes in the abortion law but face opposition from a strong pro-life lobby in a country with one of Asia’s largest percentages of Christians and a government trying to boost the lowest fertility rate in the developed world.

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