April 12, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Last August, I reported on the protests against South Korea’s strict abortion laws, which at one point involved 125 women publicly swallowing abortion pills to challenge the government’s stance. South Korean pro-lifers have been pushing back, responding to a petition of 230,000 signatures demanding that abortion be legalized with a counter-petition of over a million signatures supporting South Korea’s pro-life laws. Over half of South Koreans still believe that abortion is murder, and abortion has been illegal there except in cases of rape, incest, the mother’s health, or severe genetic disorders since 1953.

Despite that, South Korean abortion activists have finally achieved victory via another route, with the constitutional court ruling that the nation’s abortion laws must be changed and ordering the national assembly to revise the current regime by the end of 2020. If the law is not changed by then, the court will simply void the current laws. Abortion activists had almost achieved this result in 2012, when four justices voted in favour of scrapping South Korea’s abortion laws and four had voted against, with the ninth seat needed to break the deadlock standing vacant.

The reasoning of the court was particularly insidious. “Embryos completely depend on the mother’s body for their survival and development,” they wrote, “so it cannot be concluded that they are separate, independent living human beings entitled to the right to life.” In short: Because the human being (embryo is simply an age classification, although abortion activists bizarrely use the term for dehumanizing purposes) is dependent on others for survival, he or she has no right to life. This is an inversion of how civilized societies once viewed their responsibilities to those who are weaker and more vulnerable.

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Abortion activists, predictably, have been ghoulishly celebrating this decision. “Women deserve to be as happy as much as we want today,” Bae Bok-ju rather confusingly told The Guardian. “Today’s decision was made because countless women ceaselessly fought for their rights for so many years. We deserve the world’s attention and we deserve its recognition.” And the pre-born children of South Korea, in her mind, do not deserve legal recognition or the simple right not to be killed. The court, in fact, stated that the government must allow for abortion in the early stages of pregnancy in certain circumstances, and that doctors who commit abortions cannot be subject to legal consequences.

Abortion activists had also placed pressure on the government by claiming that there is an enormous number of illegal abortions in South Korea, and that the law was clearly ineffective due to the minuscule number of prosecutions carried out in response. The South Korean president Moon Jae-in, who is Catholic, has not stated his position directly, but he apparently appointed five of the current constitutional justices who voted to eliminate South Korea’s pro-life laws. His appointees gave abortion activists hope that the law could finally be changed.

We do not yet know what the South Korean legislators will draft in response to the constitutional court’s decision, but it seems likely that some form of first-trimester abortion-on-demand will be the result. It is heartbreaking to see yet another country that had maintained its support for the human rights of the pre-born for over sixty years, at least in partial form, finally fall to the abortion activists, and saddening to watch the ugly displays of celebratory selfishness that greeted the news that a court was stripping away the rights of some human beings because of their dependency on other human beings. No cost is too high to pay for sexual freedom, it seems—not even the lives of our own children.