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Paper short abstract

This paper reconsiders abortion policy in post-war Japan by foregrounding its eugenic foundations. Using administrative records, it shows how maternal protection shaped practice, challenging assumptions about ‘economic’ abortion and linking policy to post-war reconstruction and disability exclusion.

Paper long abstract

Abortion has been a topic of intense scrutiny in modern and contemporary Japan. The established narrative on the post-war history of abortion in Japan holds that abortion contributed to the country’s declining birth rates in the mid-twentieth century, as it was made de facto legal by the Eugenic Protection Law (1948). In particular, the 1949 amendment to the Law, which permitted abortions on ‘economic’ grounds, is widely understood to have accelerated fertility decline by expanding women’s access to abortion. This narrative also emphasises how the legal framework, compounded by gender discrimination, produced a distinctive contraceptive landscape in post-war Japan, in which early- to mid-term abortion functioned as a primary form of birth control. Finally, it highlights abortion as a key site where women navigated the tensions and intersections between women’s and disability movements in the 1970s.

Despite this scholarship, the eugenic dimension of abortion policy has received surprisingly little attention. Abortion in Japan was legalised through explicitly eugenic imperatives and was required to be performed strictly under the Eugenic Protection Law. This paper addresses this gap by examining administrative records of eugenic abortions conducted between 1948 and 1952, a period during which all procedures under the Law had to be reviewed and approved by Prefectural Eugenic Protection Review Boards prior to operation. It demonstrates that maternal protection—another stated objective of the Law—was a principal justification for eugenic operations recorded in these files.

These findings are significant in two respects. First, they challenge the assumption that the 1949 amendment automatically and immediately resulted in widespread abortions on ‘economic’ grounds. Second, many recorded procedures were not ‘eugenic’ insofar as they aimed to protect women’s health as mothers rather than to realise the Law’s original goal ‘to prevent the birth of defective offspring from a eugenic point of view’. Nonetheless, abortions conducted under the Eugenic Protection Law remained closely tied to Japan’s post-war, economically driven reconstruction, which prioritised the productivity of able-bodied citizens while marginalising disabled bodies as unproductive.