Scrutiny grows over why Japanese doctors require sexual assault victims to get consent for abortion from the father

Japanese celebrity Dewi Sukarno (pictured) recently made the astonishing assertion on a TV show that “the foremost cause of infertility is abortion.”

Though abortion is relatively common in Japan, it still carries a stigma and the social structures are not in place that you might expect, as Sukarno’s ignorance demonstrates.

As Nikkei reported this month, rape survivors must get consent from their sexual predator to have an abortion.

One woman who was assaulted by an acquaintance was told by hospital after hospital that they could not proceed with an abortion without consent from the father. “You know him, so you should be able to get him to sign off,” one doctor confidently said.

Such a requirement forces rape survivors to relive trauma. In the woman’s case, she could only get an abortion after a recommendation from a support group, by which time it was a riskier and more expensive second-term abortion.

“Why do victims have to suffer again and again?” she said.

The Maternal Health Act requires consent from the mother and her “spouse,” and the Japan Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ template for abortion paperwork likewise has a field for the “spouse” to fill out.

This means that doctors may block abortions for sexual assault victims because their attackers does not agree, though a legal lobby group has submitted a written request to the Japan Medical Association asking to stop this practice.

“The [paperwork] template is a big part of the problem,” said a lawyer. “Doctors may seek consent from the attackers because they don’t want to leave part of the form blank.”

The Japan Medical Association last year told gynecologists to request documentation from sexual assault victims like a bill of indictment or a court sentence.

This bizarre situation is based on the desire to protect medical institutions against the risk of a lawsuit by the father. Sometimes the perpetrators do not even understand or recognize that they assault their victims.

Getting a bill of indictment or something similar is easier said than done, since the majority of sexual assault survivors in Japan do not contact police, whose systems and attitudes for dealing with rape and related crimes are infamously lacking, as the case of Shiori Ito made widely known.

“Being denied an abortion at the hospital could be a form of ‘second rape,'” said one representative from a support group.

The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, in response to criticism, did go so far recently as to clarify that the Act does not mean that doctors need the consent of rapists. But this is unlikely to stop doctors asking women for the father to sign off on the abortion procedure.