Seven Years After Constitutional Court Ruling, South Korea Moves to Allow Abortion Pill 'Mifegyne'

[Anchor]

We have reported several times on how women have been forced to take risks because abortion pills remain unauthorized, even though seven years have passed since the Constitutional Court ruled the punishment for abortion unconstitutional. It has been learned that the government is now leaning toward legalizing these medications.

Reporter Park Ha-jeong has the details.

[Reporter]

Some obtain drugs of unknown ingredients through social media and take them.

[Seller: Another high school student bought them, and after about two or three weeks, it all worked (abortions were successful).]

Others even receive chemotherapy injections used for leukemia treatment, which carry risks of side effects.

[Nurse: What you can do with an injection is that the gestational sac must not be visible.]

This is the reality South Korean women are enduring in 2026 to terminate pregnancies.

This is because alternative legislation allowing medical abortion has not been enacted, even seven years after the Constitutional Court ruled that punishing abortion is unconstitutional.

Citing this, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety has also refrained from approving abortion pills like Mifegyne, which are sold legally overseas.

[President Lee Jae-myung (Cabinet Meeting in July): The government might evade responsibility by leaving people outside the law, but the public is being put in danger.]

Subsequently, the Ministry of Government Legislation issued an interpretation last month that abortion pills can be approved even before a revision of the law, and it has been confirmed that the government has established a policy to permit the use of medical abortion drugs for early pregnancies of up to nine weeks.

In the case of Mifegyne, clinical trial results have been reported showing a success rate of 94.9% to 97.3% for terminating pregnancies within nine weeks.

Considering that the punishment for abortion has not been abolished, a system where hospitals handle both prescription and dispensing internally is being reviewed for pharmacists for a period of two years.

[Lee Jae-kwan / Chairman of the Korean Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology: In-hospital prescriptions are necessary for safe management. The point of whether it should be nine weeks or ten weeks lies in finding the optimal balance between safe administration and patient accessibility.]

Opposition from religious circles and others remains a variable, while the medical community maintains that safety measures must be strengthened, such as limiting prescriptions to obstetrician-gynecologists.

(Video Editing: Jeon Min-gyu, Design: Lee Ga-jin)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.