South Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety on Wednesday specified that the goal is to approve the country’s first abortion pill by the first quarter of 2027, filling a legal vacuum after Korea’s Constitutional Court struck down the country’s criminal abortion ban in 2019.
Gender and Family Minister Won Min-kyong said at a news conference that the drug, a two-tablet combination of mifepristone and misoprostol, would be available to women up to the ninth week of pregnancy. For the first two years, doctors will prescribe and dispense the drugs directly in hospitals, before moving to a system where doctors prescribe and dispense drugs at independent pharmacies.
Prime Minister Han Seong-sook announced the plan at a government policy coordination meeting, saying it aimed to allow women “to receive treatment within a safe medical system without having to rely on untested methods.”
The nine-week limit is exceeded twelve weeks The World Health Organization (WHO) says the pills are safe to use, a gap that Shin Jun-su, director-general of drug safety at the Ministry of Drug Safety, attributes to the scope of clinical trial data submitted with the local drug application.
In its 2019 ruling, which was decided 7-2, the 66-year-old criminal ban was an unconstitutional restriction on a pregnant woman’s right to self-determination and ordered Parliament to do so revise the law until the end of 2020.
Lawmakers failed to do so, and some women have since received unconfirmed abortion drugs through unauthorized online channels. In July, President Lee Jae Myung directed officials to consider approving the two-drug regimen. According to the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (KIHASA), an estimate 32,000 abortions were performed in South Korea in 2020, with the vast majority being surgical abortions rather than medication abortions.
According to South Korea’s Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, around 101 countries allowed abortion pills in 2024.
Reactions split along familiar lines. The Korea Women’s Associations United called the announcement “a first step in supporting safe abortion” but called for faster access and insurance coverage.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Korea said it had “deep concerns” and warned that the plan “will further exacerbate the disregard for human life in our society.” Various religious groups said they planned to file a lawsuit against the drug’s approval.
Parliament has has yet to be officially changed The provisions of the Penal Code were invalidated by Korea’s Constitutional Court in 2019, so the ministry did not plan to proceed without the legal revision required for the ruling. In March 2026, Amnesty International sentenced the conviction of a woman who underwent an abortion later in her pregnancy and attributed the delay in an earlier abortion to the National Assembly’s failure to align domestic abortion laws with the 2019 ruling.
