(LifeSiteNews) — A South Korean woman in her twenties, identified by her surname Kwon, has been convicted along with two doctors for murdering her newborn baby. Predictably, the mainstream press is framing the story as evidence that legal late-term abortion is necessary.
“The woman wanted to terminate the pregnancy at 36 weeks – but prosecutors said the baby was born alive and later killed,” the BBC reported. Of course, “terminating the pregnancy” would also have involved killing that same baby – after he or she could have survived outside the womb.
The baby was born alive via C-section, and doctors placed the child in a freezer. The child froze to death. Kwon, who insisted that she did not know “the procedure would be carried out that way” (as the BBC put it), was sentenced to a three-year suspended jail sentence; the operating surgeon and the hospital director were given four- and six-year prison sentences.
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The case attracted enormous public attention in South Korea. Kwon uploaded a vlog to YouTube in 2024 describing her experience of what she called abortion at 36 weeks; the video triggered public outrage, accusations of infanticide, and calls for an official investigation. The Ministry of Health and Welfare requested a police investigation, which discovered that the baby had been born alive and subsequently killed.
When it was discovered that the child was born alive, the police changed their investigation from “unregulated abortion” to homicide – which, as the case chillingly highlights, is a distinction without a difference. Still, mainstream press coverage emphasizes that these convictions mark the “first time that murder charges have been pressed against women seeking a late-stage termination of their pregnancy, and the doctors involved in the procedure.”
The police investigation revealed that the hospital had falsified their records, recording the death of the baby who had perished in the freezer as a stillbirth. The hospital had been running an abortion business, and according to prosecutors, “had allegedly received a total of 1.4 billion won [$942,340] to perform abortions on more than 500 patients,” most of whom, like Kwon, were introduced to the hospital by brokers.
At trial, both the hospital director and the attending surgeon confessed to having killed Kwon’s baby, and both were remanded into custody immediately. Kwon claimed that she was unaware that she was pregnant until seven months, and that she sought an abortion because she had been drinking alcohol, smoking, and did not have a stable income.
But the judge determined that Kwon had been told by medical staff that her child was healthy and heard the heartbeat via an ultrasound; it was also confirmed that Kwon was aware that her baby would be born alive via C-section. The judge did, however, give her a more lenient sentence due to the lack of support for Kwon in “late-stage pregnancy” as well as confusion surrounding South Korea’s abortion regime.
South Korea’s Constitutional Court overturned the country’s abortion ban in 2019 and recommended that lawmakers pass amendments permitting abortion up until 22 weeks (the earliest a child has survived outside the womb is 21 weeks). Parliament was given until the end of 2020 to change the abortion laws; the government proposed a bill legalizing abortion on demand until 14 weeks, with feticide permitted until 24 weeks in cases of rape or specific health circumstances.
“However, that bill was held by a gridlock in Parliament, due to opposition from conservative lawmakers on religious grounds,” the BBC reported. “By the time the ban’s removal took effect in 2021, the country had no legislation in place to regulate abortion.” Thus, abortion is now perpetrated in a legal vacuum. Abortion is decriminalized, and unregulated.
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There are two possible responses to this horrifying case. The first is the cruel, utilitarian logic of abortion activists: To prevent the “necessity” of killing infants by freezing them to death, we should instead ensure that they can be killed earlier, or at least, while they are still in the womb, via lethal injection, dismemberment, and decapitation. For abortion activists, the killing isn’t the problem – the baby is.
For pro-lifers, this case is yet another horrific example of medical professionals ensuring that the job they set out to do is finished one way or the other. Babies are born alive and left to die with horrific regularity everywhere abortion regimes have been established. A viral photo of “Baby Samuel,” a little boy born alive and left to die sucking his thumb after an attempted abortion in Australia, has stunned those who still possess a conscience – while the authorities scramble to suppress the photo.
For pro-lifers, the problem is not the baby – it is the killing. It may bother abortion activists that a baby was put into a freezer. But what they advocate for is no better.
