By MASANORI ISOBE/ Staff Writer
February 4, 2021 at 17:01 JST
Lawyers Mai Kaneko, left, and Shohei Sakai are representing the widow and her deceased husband in the compensation lawsuit filed in Sapporo District Court. (Sakura Kawamura)
SAPPORO--A district court has rejected a married couple’s compensation claim that argued the wife was forcibly sterilized and coerced into an abortion because of her intellectual disability under the former Eugenic Protection Law.
The couple filed the lawsuit in June 2018 seeking 11 million yen ($105,000) each in compensation on the grounds that their reproductive rights were violated.
The husband died in 2019 at age 82 and his nephew took over as a plaintiff. The 77-year-old widow also continued with the lawsuit.
However, the Sapporo District Court ruled that she did not undergo a forced sterilization and that the coerced abortion had nothing to do with her intellectual disability.
A number of lawsuits have been filed around Japan by those forcibly sterilized under the now-abolished Eugenic Protection Law, which was intended to “prevent the birth of inferior offspring” and had encouraged abortions among disabled people and others.
In past rulings, compensation claims have been rejected on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired. But some courts have ruled that the Eugenic Protection Law was unconstitutional.
The Sapporo District Court did not touch upon the constitutionality of the old law.
The ruling was the first for an individual said to have been coerced into having an abortion. According to the lawsuit, the widow developed an intellectual disability after she had a fever as an infant.
She married in 1977 and became pregnant in 1981. Relatives pressured her husband to sign a document agreeing to the abortion and forced sterilization on the grounds that the couple would be unable to properly care for the child.
The husband did not go against his relatives’ wishes and signed the document. His wife had the abortion in June 1981.
The district court ruling said there was no objective evidence that the woman actually underwent forced sterilization. It acknowledged she had an abortion, but ruled that there was a possibility the reason was financial and not because of her disability.
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