By ISSEI YAMAMOTO/ Staff Writer
July 20, 2024 at 13:38 JST
A stone marker stands outside the building that houses the Osaka District Court and the Osaka High Court in Osaka’s Kita Ward. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
OSAKA--In a groundbreaking ruling, a court here ordered a man to pay 740,000 yen ($4,700) in damages to a woman he made pregnant after he spurned her pleas to wear a condom during sex and then refused to recognize the child as his.
“It was a violation of the woman’s right to sexual self-determination,” the Osaka District Court said July 19.
Lawyers championing women’s rights hailed the ruling as a “landmark decision.”
According to the ruling, the woman had sex with the man twice from 2020 to 2021 at a hotel.
In both cases, she asked the man to don a contraceptive provided by the hotel, but he did not comply, and it resulted in her falling pregnant.
When she asked him to formally recognize the child as his, her lover refused, saying, “I’m married.”
At that point, the woman sought legal redress and filed a lawsuit for 1.73 million yen in damages.
In its ruling, the court noted that “the physical and emotional burden of pregnancy is great, and it is incurred only by the woman.”
“Even if the woman consents to sexual intercourse, if the man continues the act without complying with her request for contraception, it violates her right to sexual self-determination,” the court added.
It noted that the man satisfied his sexual desires but ignored the woman’s feelings, and told the woman “it is your own fault” that she got pregnant.
The court ordered the man to pay damages and other fees.
“It is obvious that sexual intercourse without consent constitutes an illegal act, but it is difficult for (a woman) to strongly object to her partner’s refusal to use contraception when she is emotionally involved with the partner,” defense lawyer Daisuke Mukai said. “Unfortunately, many women do not take such cases to court.”
Mukai said the decision “opens the way for those who would otherwise cry themselves to sleep to recover from the damage” they faced.
Juri Yukita, a lawyer who has worked for many years in the defense of women’s rights, praised the decision and called it “groundbreaking because it recognizes independent and different rights for sexual intercourse itself and for contraceptive consent.”
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