The police withheld the woman’s identity (Representational)
Seoul:
South Korean police said Monday they were investigating a YouTuber who vlogged about a late-term abortion, sparking outrage online and calls from the country’s Health Ministry for a murder investigation.
The woman, whose identity was withheld by police, claimed in a video posted on Google-owned YouTube in June that she had an abortion in the thirty-sixth week of her pregnancy, saying she only discovered she was pregnant very late in the process.
The footage, which was later deleted, quickly went viral in South Korea, with screenshots still circulating widely online and the country’s health ministry calling for a murder investigation.
“We have accused the woman and the head of a medical clinic who performed the procedure,” a representative of the Seoul Police Agency told AFP.
Police confirmed the footage was genuine, saying they had identified the clinic where the procedure was carried out through analysis of the video.
Police are investigating exactly what happened, an officer was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency, adding that the investigation could involve more people.
Until 2019, South Korea was one of the few industrialized nations that broadly criminalized abortion except in cases of rape, incest and when the mother’s health was in danger.
But five years ago, the Constitutional Court ordered the lifting of the decades-old ban, ruling that the 1953 statute “goes against the Constitution.”
He ordered the law to be reviewed by the end of 2020, but it has not yet been done.
As a result of the legal vacuum, there is technically no limit on late-term abortions, but the police claim authority to investigate.
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