Abortion in Japan - History

History

Japanese documents show records of induced abortion from as early as the 12th century. During the Edo period and earlier, abortion was legal, though the upper classes and those in urban areas practiced it more often than poor, rural people, who tended to resort to infanticide. Government leaders condemned abortion as "immoral acts of murder" and accused practitioners of trying to deprive the nation of future taxpayers. In 1667, it became illegal to use signs to advertise abortion services.

In 1842, the Shogunate in Japan banned induced abortion in Edo, but the law did not affect the rest of the country until 1869, when abortion was banned nation-wide. However, the crime was rarely punished unless the conception was a result of adultery or the woman died as a result of the abortion procedure.

According to the scholar Tiana Norgern, the abortion policy under the Meiji government was similar to that of the Edo period, and was fueled by the belief that a large population would yield more military and political influence on the international stage. In 1868, the emperor banned midwives from performing abortions, and in 1880, Japan's first penal code declared abortion a crime. The punishments for abortion grew more severe in 1907 when the penal code revised: women could be incarcerated for up to a year for having an abortion; practitioners could be jailed for up to seven. The Criminal Abortion Law of 1907 is still technically in effect today, but other legislation has overridden its effects.

In 1923, doctors were granted legal permission to perform emergency abortions to save the mother's life; abortions performed under different, less life-threatening circumstances were still prosecuted. In 1931, the Alliance for Reform of the Anti-Abortion Law (Datai Hō Kaisei Kiseikai) was formed by Abe Isoo and argued that "it is a woman's right not to bear a child she does not want, and abortion is an exercise of this right". This organization believed that abortion should be made legal in circumstances in which there was a high chance of genetic disorder; in which a woman was poor, on public assistance, or divorced; in which it endangered the woman's health; and in which the pregnancy was a result of rape. In 1934, the Fifth All-Japan Women's Suffrage Congress wrote up resolutions calling for the legalization of abortion as well as contraception. This did not result in any immediate reaction from the government at the time, but after the war, these resolutions were consulted when drafting legislation legalizing abortion.

In 1940, the National Eugenic Law stopped short of explicitly calling abortion legal by outlining a set of procedures a doctor had to follow in order to perform an abortion; these procedures included getting second opinions and submitting reports, though these could be ignored when it was an emergency. This was a daunting and complicated process that many physicians did not want to deal with, and some sources attribute the fall in abortion rate between 1941 and 1944 from 18,000 to 1,800 to this legislation.

After World War II, Japan found itself in a population crisis. In 1946, 10 million people were declared at risk of starvation, and between the years 1945 and 1950, the population increased by 11 million. In 1948, Japan legalized abortion under special circumstances. Eugenic Protection Law of 1948, made Japan one of the first to legalize induced abortion. This law was revised as the Maternal Body Protection Law in 1996.

Currently, abortion is widely accepted in Japan. According to a 1998 survey, 79 percent of unmarried and 85 percent of married women approved of abortion. According to researchers at Osaka University in 2001, 341,588 legal abortions were carried out in Japan, a 2.5 percent increase from 1998 to 2001. However, in 2007 the figure had decreased to around 256,000.