A group of South Korean lawmakers introduced legislation aimed at easing the country’s ban on doctors telling parents the gender of unborn babies, a National Assembly aide said yesterday.
The government established the ban in 1987 to try to prevent abortions of female fetuses in a country where many prefer sons due to a Confucian belief that males carry on family lines.
However, the Constitutional Court ruled against the ban last month, saying South Korea has grown out of preference for sons and the regulations restrict the basic rights of parents and doctors.
The ruling noted that the sex-ratio imbalance — once as high as 116 boys to 100 girls — had fallen, approaching the natural level of about 106 boys to 100 girls.
The court ordered the law be revised to reflect the ruling by the end of next year and said the current ban will stand until the revision.
On Wednesday, 14 lawmakers — headed by the ruling Grand National Party’s Lee Ju-young — submitted a revision of the Medical Law that would allow doctors to tell parents genders of their unborn babies over 28 weeks old, said Kim Kwang-sup, an aide to Lee.
The proposal, however, would still ban doctors’ revealing the sexes of fetuses under 28 weeks old to prevent sex-selection abortions, Kim said. Abortion is illegal in South Korea but is widely practiced.
Kim said it is medically difficult to abort fetuses older than 28 weeks, and there are health risks for mothers.
It was unclear when the National Assembly would vote on the proposal. The legislature’s ruling and opposition lawmakers are currently locked in disputes over how to share chairmanships of parliamentary committees.
If the parliament fails to enact legislation by the end of next year, the current ban would automatically be repealed, according to Kim Bok-ki, a spokesman for the Constitutional Court.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion