Abortion Laws in Asia

My name is Jazmin Mullen and I am a 2L serving as a student staff member for the Center for Global Justice. I am currently working on a project for ADF International, an alliance-building human rights organization that advocates the right of people to freely exercise their faith.

Jazmin Mullin

My group has had the pleasure to research various abortion laws and key cases in over 30 Asian countries. We’re compiling our research on a Google spreadsheet with the goal of drafting a legal memo of our findings. Some of the sources of our research are Google Scholar, law review articles, human rights reports, and United Nations documents and reports.

The purpose of the memo is to target countries that are likely to alter their abortion laws consistent with the mission of ADF International. In our findings so far, we have found that most Asian countries permit abortion under one or more of the following circumstances: (1) to save a woman’s life, (2) to preserve a woman’s physical health, or (3) to preserve a woman’s mental health. Further, in many countries, a woman is more likely to be permitted to get an abortion up to 20 weeks of gestation. Still there are some countries, like North Korea and Jordan, that do not permit abortions at all.

In drafting our legal memo, we plan to identify the countries that might alter their abortion laws to better protect life. This categorization will help ADF better target the countries they may be able to work with in changing their laws.

Since we are the first group in the Center for Global Justice to do a project for ADF International (Asia), our findings will be extremely beneficial for ADF and hopefully give them guidance as to what steps to take from here.

This post was written by a Center for Global Justice student staff member.  The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect those of Regent University, Regent Law School, or the Center for Global Justice.