TOKYO, March 17 — A Japanese court said today that a law hugely restricting women’s access to sterilisation “lacks rationality”, a ruling hailed by plaintiffs as a “step forward”.

The Tokyo District Court, however, stopped short of finding the decades-old “maternity protection” law—one of the world’s most restrictive barriers to sterilisation—to be outright unconstitutional or illegal.

It dismissed the five women’s claim that it is denying them their rights to bodily autonomy.

The landmark lawsuit saw the women unite over innate discomfort with their reproductive abilities, and aversion to what they describe as a patriarchal society that pushes women towards motherhood.

Under the law, a woman must have multiple children with her health at risk, or face life-threatening danger from pregnancy, to qualify for sterilisation. Even then, spousal consent is required.

That bans physicians from performing the procedure on healthy, childless women—such as 29-year-old plaintiff Kazane Kajiya, who never wanted children.

“This is a historic verdict,” Kajiya told reporters, as she and others unfurled a banner outside the court welcoming the ruling as a “step forward”.

Kajiya, who is married and at age 27 flew to the United States to have her fallopian tubes removed, considers her form of happiness “different from what is supposed to be the right answer in Japan”—a rapidly ageing society determined to boost falling birth rates.

But now with the ruling, “I can say I’ve done nothing wrong. I can hold my head high, and walk proudly.”

‘Contraceptive freedom’ 

In what lawyers said was a legal first, presiding judge Masahiro Kamano said women are “guaranteed contraceptive freedom” under the Constitution, and that they can “decide to avoid pregnancy, without interference from the state”.

But sterilisation isn’t the only way to achieve this, he said, noting “multiple other methods exist” for birth control.

Therefore, “it is difficult to conclude that undergoing sterilisation is essential to the survival of one’s identity”, Kamano said, denying the law goes so far as to be unconstitutional.

Still, he said its restrictiveness “lacks rationality,” and called for more active debate over the status quo.

While happy with the judgement overall, Michiko Kameishi, lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, expressed regret that the court recognised sterilisation “merely as one way of contraception”.

Instead, she said, the procedure is fundamentally about “removing fertility altogether” and therefore is the only way plaintiffs “can feel alive in their own bodies”.

For Kajiya, her battle against the maternity protection law, a holdover from a wartime, patriarchal era when women were considered less capable, will continue.

“It’s a law that stigmatises women who choose to be child-free, and makes them feel guilty about doing whatever they want to do with their bodies,” she said.

The lawsuit cited a 2002 study by EngenderHealth, a global NGO focused on sexual and reproductive health, that says more than 70 countries — including many industrialised economies — explicitly permitted the procedure as a method of contraception.

Japan was among eight countries that forbade or severely restricted it.

The Children and Families Agency, a government entity named in the lawsuit, was not immediately available to comment on the verdict. — AFP