[Anchor]
Seven years have passed since the Constitutional Court ruled the abortion law unconstitutional, yet medication for pregnancy termination remains unapproved. While the government remains idle, citing a legislative vacuum, women are resorting to even receiving injections intended for chemotherapy to terminate pregnancies.
Reporter Park Ha-jeong investigates the reality.
[Reporter]
At an obstetrics and gynecology clinic in Gyeonggi Province, when asked for a consultation on pregnancy termination, the staff suggests two methods.
[Staff at Clinic A: We have surgery and an injection. For the injection, the gestational sac must not be visible yet.]
When asked what the injection is, the response was methotrexate, or MTX.
It is a chemotherapy drug used to treat conditions like leukemia and has been prescribed off-label only in cases where the mother is at risk, such as in ectopic pregnancies.
[Staff at Clinic A: You can consider it to be 850,000 won. You will receive the injection twice. Rather than saying it is good or bad for your body, it lowers your immunity. In any case, it kills good cells, too.]
Some clinics even advertise that they provide this injection for pregnancy termination even when it is not an ectopic pregnancy.
[Staff at Clinic B: (I heard it is only for ectopic pregnancies, is it possible even if it is not?) Yes, many people who find surgery burdensome in the early stages do it.]
The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety has previously warned that this injection can cause adverse reactions such as fetal malformation or ovarian dysfunction.
Nevertheless, the main reason women keep this injection as an option is that abortion pills like Mifegyne have not received approval from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety.
Since the 2019 ruling that the punishment for abortion was unconstitutional, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety has maintained the position that legal amendments, such as determining from how many weeks of pregnancy medication-based termination should be allowed, must come first.
In the meantime, while abortion pills are permitted in 101 countries around the world, women in South Korea are buying them in the shadows without medical diagnosis or prescriptions, unable to verify if they are authentic, or are seeking dangerous chemotherapy injections.
[President Lee Jae-myung (July 14, Cabinet Meeting): By leaving it outside the law, the government may be avoiding responsibility, but the public is being put in danger.]
Relevant ministries have belatedly begun working-level discussions, and as the introduction of pregnancy termination medication is specified as a national task, swift and responsible measures appear necessary.
Reported by Park Ha-jeong | Video by Yoon Tae-ho | VJ by Shin So-young and Oh Se-gwan | Graphics by Han Heung-soo | Produced by SBS Digital News
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