The US Supreme Court’s ruling on June 24 that abortion is not protected under the US constitution, reversing the Roe v Wade ruling from nearly 50 years ago, sent the issue back to individual US states to decide. The ruling is expected to trigger a series of legal battles at the state level and has already sparked a wave of protests.
A trend toward the legalization or decrimilization of artificially induced abortion has been taking hold across the globe, whatever the motivations of the government of each country for promoting the procedure may be. In Taiwan abortion is legal, but conditional, according to the Genetic Health Act (優生保健法).
Those who support the legalization of abortion originally stated that their main consideration was to meet the needs of women in special circumstances, such as victims of rape and those who are physically unsuited to giving birth. The argument at the time was that legalizing abortion would eliminate illegal procedures by providing women with greater security guarantees.
However, with the abortion law as it currently stands, practically any woman who wishes to terminate her pregnancy can legally have an abortion, without any special circumstances.
Furthermore, since Taiwan legalized conditional abortion, the number of illegal abortions has not fallen, and it has aggravated a cycle of casual abortions and sexual abuse. In the past, a woman would only have an abortion if she was left with no choice or was in a difficult situation, for example if having a child would put her in financial difficulty or if she had become pregnant outside of wedlock.
However, in today’s society, young students use abortion as if it were contraception and display an indifferent attitude toward it. Women are seeking abortions at ever younger ages. The procedures are no longer limited to September — following an active summer recess — and are becoming an almost daily occurrence.
Gynecologists are even lamenting that some women seem to treat abortion as a trivial matter, with some undergoing multiple abortions within a single year.
According to data published by the Ministry of Health and Welfare in 2019, every year 30,000 to 40,000 women take the oral abortion pill Mifepristone, or RU-486, while 60,000 to 70,000 women apply for surgical abortions through the National Health Insurance system, the vast majority of which are a result of fetal abnormalities or other medical reasons. The number of women who undergo surgical abortions due to unintended pregnancies is unknown, as this involves personal information.
In 2017, the number of births in Taiwan fell below 200,000 for the first time and has continued to fall sharply since then. By contrast, between 90,000 and 110,000 fetuses are aborted in Taiwan every year and are denied a place in this world. It should ring alarm bells for any nation that wants to survive, as nearly one-third of total pregnancies are terminated every year in Taiwan.
Following the US Supreme Court’s historic ruling on Roe v Wade, which terminates constitutional protection for abortion, hopefully more people will face up to the procedure’s problems. With the general mood of society becoming increasingly open-minded and emphasizing a form of eugenics, hopefully people will reflect upon whether aborting fetuses is a good way to solve society’s problems.
The system fails to realize the good intentions of early advocates of abortion, and creates more problems than it solves at an individual and societal level. In particular, people must reflect on the serious negative impact that abortion provisions have had on the healthy development of society and culture.
Dino Wei is an information engineer.
Translated by Edward Jones
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