*Reproductive justice is needed for Japanese women
It's over 15 years since I set about researching on actual abortion situations in Japan as a graduate student, but abortion situations here have not been changed a lot.
At first, there were virtually nobody in Japan who had been throughly researching on this topic, abortion, except some ethicists, jurists and ob-gyn doctors most of whom blamed women for their selfishness and coldness, or a few feminist thiorists with some sympathetic opinions and laments for the status quo.
On the other hand, the number and the rate of abortion dicreased over the 15 years. The number of abortions in Japan in 2003 exceeded 300,000, almost twice as many as the one of the latest statistics. The rate of abortion experienced by women of 15-45 years old also devreased from11.2 in 2003 to 6.4 in 2018.
However, the abortion care has not been changed so much for more than 6 decades.
Mifepristone has not been approved yet in Japan. D&C is not only the main method for early pregnancy here in Japn, but the leaders of Japanese ob-gyn doctors vindicate its safety thereof.
I hope Japanese reproductive health care will be more women-friendly one in the near future. To serve this goal, I have been and am going to keep researching abortion problems in this nation, and I report some of the results here as memorandums.
