Court upholds government block on abortion pill website
The court dismissed the Canadian nonprofit's case because the pills were not manufactured, imported or approved for use in Korea, as well as on procedural grounds.
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A Canadian nonprofit’s website that mails abortion pills to women worldwide will stay blocked in Korea after a Seoul court ruled that the government’s ban was not unlawful, according to legal sources on Saturday.
The Seoul Administrative Court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Women on Web against the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC), seeking to overturn the regulator’s corrective order ㅑon June 12.
The block is “hard to see as unlawful because Women on Web’s provision of abortion pills that were not manufactured, imported or approved for use in Korea violated the Pharmaceutical Affairs Act,” the court said. It therefore ruled that the website’s content constituted “information intended for a crime” under the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection, which states that “no one shall distribute information intended for a crime, or that instigates or aids one.”
It also dismissed the case on procedural grounds: The power of attorney allowing the lawyers to represent Women on Web was not notarized, so those lawyers were not legally authorized to bring the suit in the first place.
Women on Web provides abortion pills by mail to women around the world who order them through its website.
The KCSC issued a corrective order to network operators in October 2024, directing them to block access to the website. In February of the following year, the commission demanded that the domain registrar cancel the site’s domain.
Women on Web filed the administrative lawsuit in May 2025, challenging the KCSC’s measures. The nonprofit argued that providing the abortion pills was a legitimate act carried out under necessity and thus not unlawful.
An “act carried out under necessity” refers to one taken to avoid a present danger to one’s own or another person’s life, body, freedom or property.
The court, however, found that with the Constitutional Court’s ruling that criminalizing abortion was unconstitutional, no provision punishing the termination of pregnancy exists, making it difficult to view women seeking abortions as facing “danger.”
Women on Web filed an appeal on June 30.
BY SHIN HYE-YEON [[email protected]]
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
