미국 낙태제한입법의 흐름: 심장박동법과 향후 전망

The issue of abortion, which is a problem around the fundamental human values ​​of women’s right to self-determination and protection of the life of the fetus, is a sensitive social topic that encompasses various contexts including politics, economy, society, and culture. Legislative attempts to restrict abortion in the United States have been consistently made mainly in states with strong religious and conservative tendencies. Under such circumstances, since 2013, legislative movements to achieve the purpose of restricting abortion through legislation of the so-called ‘Heartbeat Law’ have been spreading in the United States. This argument that abortions should be allowed or restricted based on the ‘heartbeat’, which symbolizes life, is actually one of the attempts to ban most abortions by appealing to the absolute value of respect for life. Despite of laws incapacitated by the court’s decision, these legislative attempts have expanded across the United States, and in recent years, legislative detours have been mobilized to evade the nullification of the law. There are growing concerns about a possible imbalance. In Korea, a legislative vacuum on abortion continues in accordance with the Constitutional Court’s unconstitutional decision on the crime of abortion in 2019. With this in mind, this article tried to find ideas about the standards for the allowance and restriction of abortion in the future by analyzing the flow of abortion-related legislation and precedents in the US.