On March 18th, the New Zealand parliament decriminalized abortion and passed a bill allowing women to choose termination up to 20 weeks of pregnancy. Abortion was the only medical procedure to be considered as a crime in the past 40 years in New Zealand. A woman could choose termination only when two doctors decided that she was under a serious health threat. However, in the revised bill, women less than 20 weeks pregnant are able to make their own decision without getting extra mental and physical examinations. Moreover, women can independently choose to have a termination operation without getting guardians or doctors’ agreements. On March 18th, at the plenary session to vote on the bill legalizing abortion, Minister of Justice Andrew Little said, “From now abortions will be rightly treated as a health issue.” “The previous law required women seeking an abortion to go through many hoops. The changes agreed to by parliament will better ensure women get advice and treatment in a more timely way,” he added.

In China, websites that offer sexual exploitation images and videos of minors surfaced, and the Chinese authority has started an investigation. On March 26th, a famous Chinese blogger publicized the incident, saying that she had been informed recently about five minors’ sex exploitation websites by her fans. According to The Beijing Times (TBT), the websites were operated by classifying the website members’ classes based on the membership fee each one paid. Then, the websites allowed them to browse through minors’ sex exploitation videos which ranged from babies to teenagers, depending on the membership classes. A representative website called, “Yamao website” had 8,600,000 members at dawn of March 27th. Beijing-based IT worker Wand Yaodong told the TBT that those websites could avoid Chinese police and clampdowns from the Internet Department as its domain and server were located in overseas. Some of websites’ domain was found out to be in Seoul. On March 28th, the Chinese authority shut down the websites, started collecting evidence and announced they would severely punish people who are related to the website. However, concerns are being voiced about the absence of law to punish all the members of the website, even though the website’s operator can be punished.

By Lee Chae-Young, Reporter

chaeyoung0702@pusan.ac.kr