According to information from Guardian, the emergency oral contraceptive, commonly known as the morning-after pill, is scheduled to be approved in Japan later this year. However, prior to its medical prescription, women could be forced to request the consent of their partner.
Regulation to support morning-after pills is moving forward in Japan’s parliament after British pharmaceutical organization Line Pharma International last year asked to show a two-drug combination for the motivations behind early discontinuation.
With this new measure, Japan would join countries that have legalized the emergency pill such as Australia, Argentina, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. However, the bill has been criticized by women’s rights groups for conditioning its access to the consent of the partner.
The bill stemming from Japan’s 1948 Maternal Protection Law, which requires partner consent for surgical abortions with very few exceptions, is a policy that activists say “tramples” on women’s reproductive rights.
According to Bloomberg, Yasuhiro Hashimoto, a senior official at the Ministry of Health in Japan, justified the move before a parliamentary committee earlier this month:
In principle, we believe that spousal consent is necessary, even if an abortion is induced by an oral medication.
On the other hand, the lawyer Mizuho Fukushima, a member of the opposition Social Democratic party, criticized the position of the Ministry of Health:
Why should a woman need her partner’s approval? It is her body. Women are not the property of men. Their rights, not those of man, must be protected.
According to Guardian, The current policy has had tragic consequences, with a 21-year-old woman arrested after her newborn baby was found dead in a park in central Tokyo. The woman stated in court that she had been denied an abortion because she was unable to contact her partner to obtain her written consent.
Kumi Tsukahara, an activist with Action for Safe Abortion Japan, told Guardian that oral contraceptives were not legalized until 1999, after a nine-year legal debate, while Viagra was approved in just six months.
Spousal consent becomes an issue when there is a disagreement with the spouse or the spouse forces the woman to give birth against her will.
– Kumi Tsukahara
According to the Japanese Ministry of Health, around 140,000 surgical abortions were performed in 2020. According to information provided by the Safe Abortion Japan Project, abortions are not covered by insurance and cost between 90,000 and 150,000 yen (700 to 1,200 US dollars) during the first 11 weeks of gestation.
In 2016, the United Nations (UN) Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women urged Japan to remove the spousal consent requirement.
Led by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party for most of the post-World War II era, Japan trails many of its peers in reproductive care for women.