1972: GDR passes abortion law. – Culture

In some places 1972 looks like the country of tomorrow. When Norman Jewison shot the science fiction film “Rollerball”, he chose the Munich Rudi-Sedlmayer-Halle as a backdrop, for example, built in 1972 for the Olympic Games and is now called the Audi Dome. At that time, however, equality had not yet reached futuristic proportions. Family law, which was only reformed five years later, still stated that a wife was responsible for household chores and could work “to the extent that this is compatible with her marital and family responsibilities”. The fact that 1972 was a milestone year from a feminist point of view has something to do with the GDR and probably also with Alice Schwarzer. But one after anonther.

A revolutionary spirit had gripped the West at the end of the 1960s. It was not a feminist-revolutionary one. At the delegates’ congress of the Socialist German Student Union in 1968, the feminist filmmaker and author Helke Sander accused the gentlemen of being a reflection of a male-dominated social structure in an inflammatory speech, and because the gentlemen wanted to ignore this contribution, the famous tomato throwing took place, which, so to speak, became the starting signal for the second women’s movement. The women in left-wing student circles had had enough of being told that socialism would one day bring equality by itself, and perhaps this criticism had spread to the other side of the wall.

In any case, difference feminism and equality were discussed as a result, new family models were proposed and women’s bookshops opened, but above all a fight for the right to one’s own body began: A central demand of the second women’s movement was for the legalization of abortion, for physical self-determination, the it makes it possible to terminate an unwanted pregnancy without risking one’s life, without going to jail, without male objection or external assessment, which of course was a bold demand for women who, under current law, could not even have terminated their employment .

In the West, one to five years imprisonment threatened for a demolition

The 1972 version of paragraph 218 was not as draconian as the death penalty for abortion under the National Socialists, but self-determination was far from being – women faced one to five years in prison for an abortion. Incidentally, Paragraph 218 only says to this day that women are not punished for abortions, which is not the same as legalizing abortions, which is why it is also in the penal code.

Things got moving in 1971. In June, the famous appeared star-Title: It featured 24 women, some of whom were among the most famous actresses of the time. Romy Schneider was there, Senta Berger, Sabine Sinjen and Vera Tschechowa, “We have an abortion” was to be read on a yellow ribbon that ran across the title, and in the booklet was the related story by Alice Schwarzer, in which 374 women confessed to having violated the abortion ban laid down in Section 218. Later it turned out that some of them hadn’t done that at all, but actually that makes this action even nicer – what an act of sisterly solidarity. In any case, the whole thing was quite a scandal, and it fueled the debate. At the end of the year, the SPD party conference decided to reform the law.

The demand for legal abortions was not a West German phenomenon. In the USA in 1973 the case of Roe v. Wade in court and ended in the Supreme Court ruling that still governs the conditions under which women are allowed to have an abortion. Alice Schwarzers star-History had a French model. But there was also another half of Germany, the GDR. And it was there that legislation on abortion came into force in 1972, in which only the pregnant woman could actually decide.

It may be that the GDR leadership took the opportunity to thumb their nose at the West. Maybe they just wanted to do something to keep the spark of protest from flying, because the regulations in force in the GDR were still quite restrictive up to that point: there were initially regional regulations in the Soviet occupation zone. But in the GDR abortions were also only allowed for medical reasons until 1965, then social indications came along, but enforcing such a procedure was quite a degrading procedure.

In any case, the law that Western women’s rights activists were demanding should now exist: in the first twelve weeks of a pregnancy, women in the GDR were now allowed to decide for themselves whether to have an abortion, the procedure was free of charge for them, and they were given sick leave for it. On March 9, 1972, the “Law on the Interruption of Pregnancy” was passed by the People’s Chamber. “Equal rights for women in education and work, marriage and family requires that the woman can decide for herself about the pregnancy and whether to carry it to term,” said the preamble.

But of course it wasn’t that easy. The People’s Chamber of the GDR has passed only one law with dissenting votes in its history, namely that “about the termination of a pregnancy” of March 9, 1972. There were 14 dissenting votes and eight abstentions, a unique contradiction.

With reunification, the GDR’s liberal law also perished

In the West, consultations in the Bundestag began that same year, and it took another two years before abortions in the first three months of pregnancy became unpunished. The SPD and FDP government had decided on a time-limited solution. But nothing came of it: the opposition from the CDU and CSU appealed to the Federal Constitutional Court, which ruled that the deadline solution was unconstitutional. So in 1976 the current model was adopted, with the obligation to provide advice. In some areas of Germany, abortions have long since become more difficult again because there are no clinics that carry out the procedure.

But when the Wall fell, the GDR’s more progressive abortion regulations went under with it. It was the West German model that prevailed. In 1990, before reunification, there were demonstrations in front of the Palace of the Republic, with banners saying “No paragraph 218! So help us God.” It was no use: the East German “Law on the Interruption of Pregnancy” disappeared with reunification as if it had never existed. But in 1972 it was one of the most modern in the world.

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