Abortion in Japan

As one of the first countries to legalize induced abortion, it continues to be Japan’s key birth control practice. While the low-dosage pill was only legalized in 1999 (the emergency contraceptive pill still remains unapproved), abortion has been legal in Japan since 1948. This section will outline how the initial law that passed in 1948—the Eugenics Protection Law—underwent repeated amendments to ultimately become the Maternal Body Protection Law in 1996.

There already existed activists advocating to legalize abortion during the 1920s and 30s, before the commencement of the Second World War. However, the activists failed to convince the government, which focused solely on realizing the ‘Greater Japanese Empire’ by implementing multiple prenatalist policies, namely: legalizing the Criminal Abortion Law, shutting down birth control clinics, and persecuting family planning advocates.⁴¹

After the war, Japan experienced a “baby boom” where the population drastically increased, due to the unfavorable living condition citizens faced after the war. As a result, there was also a surge in unwanted pregnancies, which led to illegal—often dangerous—abortions as contraception was unavailable and unknown at the time.⁴² Concerned with the soaring rate of “back-alley” abortions, the government could no longer uphold their stance of opposing abortions.

In 1947, Japan Socialist Party (JSP) representatives Fukuda Masako, Kato Shizue, and Ota Tenrei introduced the Eugenic Protection Bill, which aimed to legalize contraception, eugenic sterilization, and physician-supervised abortion but conservative Diet members and occupation bureaucrats did not lend their support to the bill.⁴³

(left) Ota Tenrei (1900-1985). Photo from the Museum of Contraception and Abortion (MUVS)
(right) Fukuda Masako. Photo from Wikidata.

However, the bill was revived by Taniguchi Yasaburo—an obstetrician-gynecologist and Upper House representative—in the following year of 1948.⁴⁴ Taniguchi revised the Eugenic Protection Bill, and presented a less radical version of what the socialists had proposed the previous year to fellow lawmakers. The revised bill eliminated contraception and birth control—which was the one of the main foci of the socialists' draft—placing more emphasis on abortion and eugenic sterilization.⁴⁵ Taniguchi’s version of the Eugenic Protection Law ended up passing in the Diet in 1948, legalizing “abortion by a medical specialist under specified conditions.” ⁴⁶ The passage of this law made Japan one of the first countries to legalize induced abortion as a means of birth control.

The “Official Gazette”, issued on August 13th 1948, mentioning the Bill Forwarded for the Eugenic Protection Law. Photo from the No. 711 of the Official Gazette (August 13, 1948)

The Eugenic Protection Law was revised in 1949 to widen the indications for legal induced abortions by adding “economic reasons” to the terms and conditions.⁴⁷ Further revisions were made in 1952, allowing “abortions to be performed in accordance with the judgment of the supervising doctor, without having to wait for the hitherto complicated evaluation by the official institution” ⁴⁸. As a result, the number of abortions notably increased from 1949, peaking in 1955 with a historical rate of 1,170,000 applications for induced abortions.⁴⁹ In a world where such practice was yet to be legalized, Japan had transformed into an “abortion paradise”. ⁵⁰

Number of Induced Abortions, 1949~2003. From The Japanese Journal of Population Vol.4, No.1, via Maternal Body Protection Statistics.

In 1951, a “Cabinet Decision Regarding Popularization of Family Planning” was issued in response to the concerning statistics, declaring that “induced abortion is necessary in some cases from the viewpoint of protecting the mother’s body, but the current high frequency of induced abortions is not good for the mother, so a changeover to family planning is desirable.”⁵¹ Consequently, the Eugenic Protection Law underwent a further amendment in 1952 which obligated all public health centers to have a “Eugenic Protection Counseling Center”. A family planning workers system was also founded, ultimately causing the gradual decline in abortion rate.⁵² In fact, due to the introduction of Japan’s family planning initiatives, the contraceptive prevalence rate overtook the abortion rate, reaching 43% in 1960.⁵³

From 1960 onwards, Japan severely suffered from low birth rates. This led to frequent proposals for the Diet to apply stricter indications for the Eugenics Protection Law because the required conditions for induced abortion were considered “too broad” at the time.⁵⁴ However, due to the opposition towards the aforementioned proposals by the Family Planning Federation of Japan, the Eugenics Protection Law remained unamended by the government. This symbolized the government’s rescinding power over birth regulation; “the main driver of population policy gradually shifted from governments to the individuals, namely women.” ⁵⁵ Instead of Japan’s state-dominated birth control policies—that specifically focused on population control—an emphasis on women’s reproductive health rights emerged. In 1996, the final amendment was made and the Eugenic Protection Law became the Maternal Body Protection Law.

As illustrated above, Eugenic Protection Law was passed in 1948 with the hidden motive of introducing abortion as a mean of population control. Initially, the law failed to consider women’s rights, and rather concerned itself with regulating the birth rate that fluctuated throughout 20th century Japan. Nevertheless, after repeated revisions of the Eugenics Protection Law, Japanese women were finally granted reproductive rights—signified by the 1996 passage of the Maternal Body Protection Law.