Seoul will put abortion pills in hospitals by early 2027, seven years after the court struck down the ban

South Korea plans to introduce abortion pills for pregnancies of nine weeks or less in the first quarter of 2027, the government said on Wednesday. For the first two years the drugs will be prescribed and handed over inside hospitals and clinics, not at high-street pharmacies. The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety is reviewing an application from Hyundai Pharm for Mifegyne, the mifepristone product first approved in France in 1988 and now used in about 100 countries.

Prime Minister Han Seong-sook told a policy coordination meeting at the central government complex that some women are already using "dangerous methods" and that leaving the gap unattended amounts to neglecting lives and safety. Gender Equality Minister Won Min-kyong said the two-year hospital-only phase is meant to watch for safety problems and side effects before any wider dispensing rule is written.

The legal hole that lasted seven years

The Constitutional Court struck down the criminal ban on abortion in 2019. The National Assembly never passed a replacement statute. Surgical abortion continued in a grey zone. Medication abortion did not enter the formal system at all. Women who wanted pills bought them through informal channels or travelled. That is the vacuum Han described.

President Lee Jae Myung told ministers in July to look at allowing Mifegyne even before the missing legal framework is finished. Wednesday's announcement is the first official timetable that followed that instruction. A drug-ministry official said the first-quarter 2027 target holds only if the safety review and related procedures are completed.

The nine-week, or 63-day, cutoff matches the labelled use of the product under review. It is tighter than the limits in several European systems that allow medication abortion later in the first trimester. It is also tighter than what some Korean women's groups want. Doctors' organisations, for their part, want the hospital gate kept and want liability rules written before the first prescription is signed.

Who gets to write the next rule

Won framed the decision as a health and safety measure, not as a new moral settlement. "Decisions about pregnancy and childbirth have a significant impact on a woman's entire life, but institutional gaps have long denied an individual's right to safely access the medical system," she said. That sentence is the government's public line. The fight sitting behind it is about what happens after the two-year hospital phase.

If the Assembly still has not written a statute by 2028, the executive will be running a drug programme inside a legal blank. That is workable for a controlled hospital rollout. It is less workable if the plan moves, as the ministries have sketched, toward doctor prescriptions and pharmacy dispensing. Pharmacies will want a statute that tells them what they may sell. Prosecutors will want a statute that tells them what they may not charge.

Mifepristone plus misoprostol is a known regimen. The Korean debate is not about whether the chemistry works. It is about who stands between the patient and the blister pack, and about a parliament that has had seven years to answer that question and has not.