Women's Rights?

Women’s Rights? Publications Series Series Editors Max Sparreboom and Paul van der Velde Editorial Board Prasenjit Duara (University of Chicago) / Carol Gluck (Columbia University) / Christophe Jaffrelot (Centre d’E´tudes et de Recherches Internationales-Sciences- po) / Victor T. King (University of Hull) / Yuri Sadoi (Meijo University) / A.B. Shamsul (Institute of Occidental Studies / Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia) / Henk Schulte Nordholt (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Car- ibbean Studies) / Wim Boot (Leiden University) The IIAS Publications Series consists of Monographs and Edited Volumes. The aim of the Series is to promote Asia-Europe Studies. The Series includes comparative research on Europe and Asia and results from cooperation between Eur- opean and Asian scholars. The International Institute for Asian Studies stimu- lates scholarship on Asia and is instrumental in forging research networks among Asia scholars worldwide. The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) is a postdoctoral research centre based in Leiden and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Its main objective is to encou- rage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Asia and to promote national and international cooperation in the field. The institute focuses on the humanities and social sciences and, where relevant, on their interaction with other sciences. IIAS acts as an international mediator, bringing various parties together, working as a clearinghouse of knowledge and information. This entails activities such as providing information services, hosting academic organisations dealing with Asia constructing international networks, and setting up international cooperative projects and research programmes. In this way, IIAS functions as a window on Europe for non-European scholars and contributes to the cultural rapprochement between Asia and Europe. For further information, please visit www.iias.nl Women’s Rights? The Politics of Eugenic Abortion in Modern Japan Masae Kato Publications Series Monographs 2 Cover illustration: Eva Gjaltema Cover design: Maedium, Utrecht Layout: The DocWorkers, Almere ISBN 978 90 5356 793 7 e-ISBN 978 90 4850 143 4 NUR 741 / 745 © IIAS / Amsterdam University Press, 2009 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owners and the author of the book. To my Sensei To my Parents To my Sisters Contents Acknowledgments 11 Introduction 13 Problems of rights: The issue of rights in an international context 15 The aims of this book with regard to the concept of ‘rights’ 20 Related research 22 On target groups: Social movement organisations of women, disabled people, and anti-abortion activists 28 On the structure 32 1 Historical Background 35 Laws on abortion between the Meiji period and the end of the Second World War 35 The Ie household system and women’s position during the Meiji period 36 Towards the growing militarism of the 1930s 38 After the Second World War 42 2 Abortion Debates in the 1970s 59 The attempt to revise the Eugenic Protection Law: The draft proposal and those behind it 59 Reaction of women to the proposed revisions to the Eugenic Protection Law 65 The encounter between the movements of women and disabled people 66 Disabled people’s arguments against the proposal 68 In search of movement rhetoric 70 Philosophical contribution of the Women’s Liberation Movement 77 Debate inside the Women’s Liberation Movement about the concept of an individual political ‘right’ 78 8 CONTENTS 3 On women’s selfishness and the right to abortion 85 Genealogy of the concept of rights 85 Political philosophy in Japan before the concept of ‘rights’ was introduced 96 A rights analysis of the Japanese abortion debate during the 1970s 106 Towards the 1980s: The 1975 UN Women’s Conference and the solidarity of Japanese women 114 4 Abortion Debates in the 1980s 117 The 1982 attempt to repeal the economic reasons clause and the anti-abortion argument 117 The reaction of the disabled people’s movement 131 Rights in the 1980s 138 5 Analysis of the Discourse on the Concept of Individual, Political Rights in the 1980s 141 On the frequent use of the term ‘right’ in the 1980s 142 On a debate about the Mizuko business and the usage of the term ‘right’ in Japan 155 The 1980s in comparison with the 1970s 158 From the 1980s into the 1990s 159 6 The Debate on the Notion of Individual, Political Rights after the Repeal of the Eugenic Protection Law 167 The main problem after the Eugenic Protection Law: Reproductive technologies 167 Individual doctors and their perspectives on women’s right to self-determination 175 Reproductive technologies use women’s bodies 187 What can be learned from these debates? 192 7 Liberated Individuals? 195 The meaning of the ‘self’ with ‘women’s right to self-determination’ 195 Liberalism 198 On the meaning of ‘women’s right to self-determination’ as used by the women’s movement 201 ‘Who is the self’ in women’s right to self-determination 215 CONTENTS 9 Conclusion Summary of the Analysis and the Future of the Concept of ‘Rights’ 219 1970s: ‘Women’s right to abortion’ is women’s egoism 219 The 1980s: International arguments, new rhetoric, and a new phase in movements’ activities 231 The possibility of enriching the concept of ‘rights’ 235 Appendix 1 Crimes of abortion (Chapter 29 of the Japanese Penal Code) 241 Appendix 2 The Eugenic Protection Law 243 Appendix 3 The Law to Protect the Mother’s Body 257 Appendix 4 A demand letter from Osaka Aoi shiba no kai to the Hyôgo Prefecture 261 Appendix 5 A leaflet written and distributed by TANAKA Mitsu, on behalf of the Women’s Liberation Movement (Tokyo, 1973) 263 Notes 269 Bibliography 313 Index 337 Acknowledgments In completing this book, I would like to offer my gratitude to the follow- ing individuals and organisations: The Department of Political Science at Leiden University and the Joke Smit Institute for Women’s Studies for their institutional support. Spe- cial thanks go to Prof dr J. Outshoorn, for her extremely useful com- ments and inspiring discussions. Without her unconditional support this book would not have been possible. International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden, for providing researchers like myself the perfect environment to be able to pursue our works without worry. I also thank Dr M. Sleeboom-Faulkner and my colleagues in the Socio-Genetic Marginalisation in Asia Programme (SMAP) for intellectual inspiration and stimulating conversations. The activists in both the womens’ and disability movements in Japan, who gave generously of their time and allowed me to interview them. Many of the stories and experiences which they shared with me not only helped this research, but helped me develop as a person. My feminist friends in Japan, the Netherlands and all over the world. Among all the supportive organisations and individuals both in movements and academia, I am most deeply indebted to Soshiren, Tokyo. My father, mother and sisters, for their unconditional understanding of the choices I made in my life. Last, but not the least, my greatest thanks are reserved for my mentor, Prof. dr. D. Ikeda, who, even through the difficult times, always had faith in my capacities and convinced me that I – just like anyone else – can contribute to making a better world by means of academic research. This book is dedicated to him. December 2008, Leiden Masae Kato Introduction These days we are witnessing a rapid advancement in reproductive technologies, not only in the post-industrial societies of Western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, but also in societies dealing with nation-building, such as China and India. This book focuses on the issue of selective abortion, meaning the abortion of a foe- tus with an anomaly1 with the help of technologies that look for a disability and an anomaly in foetuses. In Japan, amniocentesis was first introduced in 1968.2 In 1983, in vi- tro fertilisation was practised for the first time. In the spring of 1996, maternal serum screening (MSS)3 or the ‘triple marker test’ was made available on the medical market, enabling individual medical doctors to have the test at their disposal (Sakai 1999: chapter 2).4 Ethically, selective abortion can be a highly problematic issue, and in Japan there has been an active debate about the practice, starting in the 1970s, between the movements of disabled people and of women. Whenever there was an attempt to revise the law to limit women’s access to abortion, the women’s movement has used such phrases as ‘women’s right to abortion’, ‘women decide to give birth or not to’, and ‘women’s right to self-determination’. Countering these phrases, the disabled people’s movement claims: ‘women should not argue from the concept of ‘right’ because people use the term ‘right’ to justify aborting foetuses with an anomaly’. This disagreement first came to the fore in 1972 between the Women’s Liberation Movement (hereafter the WLM) in Japan and the Aoi shiba no kai, a group of people with cerebral palsy, when anti-abortion activists attempted to revise the law for legal abortion to limit access to abortion and to introduce a selective abortion clause. A similar disagreement surfaced again in 1982, when there was another attempt to limit women’s access to abortion. During the 1990s and thus far in the 2000s there have been no attempts to limit women’s access to abortion. The Eugenic Protection Law was repealed in 1996 (Appendix 2), and currently there is no law explicitly discriminat- ing against disabled people.

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