South Korea police to probe YouTuber for abortion video

South Korean police said Monday they were investigating a YouTuber who vlogged about undergoing a late-term abortion, sparking online outrage and calls from the country’s health ministry for a murder probe.

The woman, whose identity police withheld, claimed in a video posted on Google-owned YouTube in June to have undergone an abortion in her thirty-sixth week of pregnancy, saying she had only discovered she was pregnant very late in the process.

The footage, which was later deleted, quickly went viral in South Korea, with screenshots from it still circulating widely online and the country’s health ministry calling for a murder investigation.

“We have booked the woman and the head of a medical clinic who performed the procedure as suspects,” a representative of the Seoul Police Agency told AFP.

The police confirmed the footage was genuine, saying they had identified the clinic where the procedure was performed through an analysis of the video.

Police are investigating exactly what happened, a police official said according to the Yonhap news agency, adding that the probe could implicate more people.

Until 2019, South Korea was one of just a handful of industrialised nations that broadly criminalised abortion, except in instances of rape, incest, and when the mother’s health was in jeopardy.

But five years ago, the Constitutional Court ordered the decades-old ban lifted, ruling that the 1953 statute “goes against the constitution”.

It ordered the law to be revised by the end of 2020 but it has yet to be.

As a result of the legal vacuum, there is technically no limit on late-term abortions, but police are claiming authority to investigate.