Wherever the logic of abortion spreads, institutions grow corrupt as they try to conceal the humanity of the unborn.

In May of 2026, Togitani Hinami had her first birthday. One year prior, she was born into a world her mother was already leaving. The day of Hinami’s birth was the day she and her mother, who was nine months pregnant with Hinami at the time, were struck by a car on a roadside in Aichi Prefecture in central Japan. Hinami’s mother, Togitani Sayaka, was thirty-one. Hinami was delivered by emergency caesarean section. Sayaka died two days later.

Due to the accident, Hinami was born unconscious, and has remained so ever since. Oxygen deprivation caused serious damage to her brain. She requires mechanical assistance to breathe.

In September of 2025, the driver of the car that struck and killed the heavily pregnant Togitani Sayaka was charged with negligent vehicular homicide (kashitsu unten chishi). However, the district court did not charge the driver for the injuries caused to the daughter in Sayaka’s womb. Under Japanese criminal law, a child in utero is not considered a person, but a fetus (taiji). If someone does harm to a fetus, then he or she may be charged with the crime of abortion. It is only if part of the child has emerged from the mother’s body that that child may be deemed a human being at law.

Sayaka’s bereaved husband and Hinami’s father, Togitani Yūdai, protested the framing of the prosecution. At a press conference he told reporters, “I want my daughter to be recognized as a human being.”

Minamata and the Humanity of the Unborn

There would seem to be precedents in Japanese legal history for this. At a July 2026 symposium organized by the Seimei Sonchō Senta (Respect Life Center)—a Tokyo organization with which I have been associated for some ten years now—a lawyer named Uchida Satoshi mentioned that the Japan Supreme Court’s February 1988 Minamata Disease decision, although rendered more than three decades after the disease first came to light, recognized the need for criminal penalties for the grave injuries caused to unborn children in the Minamata cases. (Readers may recall that methylmercury effluvium from a factory caused severe birth defects among women in and around Minamata in Kumamoto Prefecture, in southern Japan.)

However, as Uchida also pointed out, the Minamata decision followed the wording of the criminal code. The liability arose, according to the 1988 decision, because of the damage done to the fetus, considered “a part of the mother.” After birth, the former fetus, now born and recognized by the law as a human being, died as a result of the environmental damage in the Minamata area. But the court recognized liability only because the victim was legally considered a human being after birth.

The public sees a child where the law insists on seeing only a fetus.

Average Japanese people seem largely to reject this kind of logic. They agree with Hinami’s father, Yūdai, that Hinami is a person. A petition to have the courts see Hinami’s humanity garnered more than 113,000 signatures. The courthouse was filled with Hinami’s supporters when the trial for her mother’s killer was held. Public response to the case has been, by every measure, overwhelming. Humans can see what the law would obscure—we are all people, no matter what anyone says.

And yet, the law as written is unlikely to change. One clue as to why came from Yamada Hiroshi, a veteran politician and one of the very, very few pro-lifers in the Japanese Diet. At the same July 2026 symposium, Yamada said that he contacted members of the Ministry of Justice and asked them if they were considering changing the law so that people who, through negligence, cause injury to unborn children could be charged as such. The Justice bureaucrats told Yamada, he reported, that people in the ministry were aware of the issue, but that there was no debate on the matter.

When Yamada pressed the bureaucrats, he pointed out that the Minamata case inherently recognized fetuses as human beings and that ignoring this in cases like Hinami’s could undermine the stability of legal interpretation in Japan. While they acknowledged his point, the bureaucrats replied that the ministry would not act until the public pushed for change.

This is a shockingly callous view. What the bureaucrats were telling Yamada, in effect, was that, unlike Minamata, which was a huge political scandal, the death of one unknown woman and the injuries caused to her little girl were not politically important enough even to discuss in Ministry of Justice meetings. In other words, Togitani Sayaka and her child are too insignificant to matter.

This kind of hateful indifference is very typical of governments everywhere. How many bureaucrats in America would have more compassion than the soulless factotums in the Japanese Ministry of Justice? Sadly, too many politicians are not going to revise laws, even when it would be right and fitting, unless they are politically pressured to do so. And political pressure is not going to happen without lots of people making a huge ruckus that politicians can’t ignore. One reason it took so long for the Minamata horrors even to be recognized at the political level was that politicians were more interested in protecting big business—the factory owners and others like them—than the lives of lowly commoners in a fishing village.

But there is one more thing at work, one more reason why the criminal code in Japan is unlikely to be revised to acknowledge the humanity of the unborn. In the early postwar, a law was passed here, the Eugenic Protection Law (Yūsei hogo hō). Radical feminist socialists like Katō Shizue (1897–2001), a disciple of Margaret Sanger (1879–1966), as well as the very pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia obstetrician-gynecologist-turned-politician Ōta Tenrei (1900–1985), helped get the law through the parliament. But behind the scenes were American Occupation figures like Brigadier General Crawford Sams (1902–1994), an Army doctor who, as head of the Public Health and Welfare Section of GHQ, was concerned, for political reasons, with limiting the population of Japan. One way to do that is to encourage widescale abortion—precisely what the Eugenic Protection Law did. While abortion remained technically illegal, as it is even today, exceptions were provided for. Not too long after the passage of the Eugenic Protection Law, Japan became known worldwide as an “abortion paradise.”

This is why the criminal code will not be revised to acknowledge the humanity of people like Hinami. As in so many places around the world, the law in Japan is poisoned by the insidious logic of abortion. By establishing legal exceptions that allow for the destruction of life in utero, the system prioritizes abortion access over the rights of the innocent. The logic of death turns law into a sham.

This poison gets into everything. A former NHK journalist, and now the public representative of the Respect Life Center in Tokyo, Miyata Osamu , recalled at the July symposium how articles about traffic accidents were written for Japan’s official public broadcasting service:

“‘The mother has died’, we would write… But we would not write that the child had died, too. The person who caused the accident brought suffering to two people, not one. But that does not get mentioned.”

The lie has taken over the truth.

The humanity of the unborn must be denied at all costs. This is the root of the problem. It is why there is the worst kind of lawfare underway in Japan. This legal warfare targets the weakest members of society. It allows them to be hunted and killed for money. It warps the law, warps justice itself, so that the (lucrative) killing can go on unabated.

It’s not only in Japan. In any country where abortion is legal, even indirectly as it is here, the law rots, the logic of murder infects everything it touches. Institutions grow corrupt as they try to conceal the plain fact of the humanity of the unborn.

Nevertheless, there remain people everywhere who know the truth and fight back. Like the good man Miyata. Like Hinami’s father, Yūdai. Like my friend Nakayama Junko, head of the Respect Life Center. Nakayama has been tireless in her efforts to get the humanity of Hinami and other children recognized at law, in society, in the hearts of everyone. As long as there are people like her, there is hope that the lawfare against the unborn—in Japan, in America, everywhere—will one day be seen for what it is and brought to an end.