According to a study, unintentionally pregnant women in Bavaria sometimes have worse access to places that carry out abortions than elsewhere in Germany. Almost 20 percent of people in the Free State live in a region where it takes them more than 40 minutes by car to get to the nearest facility – this affects more than 2.5 million residents.
This emerges from the partial results of the so-called Elsa study published on Wednesday (“Experiences and life situations of unintentionally pregnant women – offers of advice and care”). This is a research project by several universities funded by the Federal Ministry of Health on the living situation of unintentionally pregnant women and on the subject of abortion.
Bavaria therefore ranks last in Germany when it comes to access to such facilities. In 85 of 400 German districts, people live outside of reasonable accessibility to the nearest abortion facility. According to the study, more than half, namely 43, of these districts are in Bavaria, eight each in Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden-Württemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia.
For the study, the addresses of more than 1,000 locations in Germany that carry out demolitions were evaluated and areas that were more than 40 minutes away by car were calculated. Berlin, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg and Bremen therefore have a high level of coverage compared to the other federal states.
The study counts Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate as regions with a low level of coverage. Lower Saxony, Brandenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saarland and Hesse are in the middle. In purely mathematical terms, there are 31,428 women between the ages of 15 and 49 in Bavaria in a facility where an abortion is possible – here too, Bavaria ended up at the bottom in this survey. For comparison: In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania the number is 6,236. “The fewer women come to a registration point, the higher the density of care,” says the study.
According to Section 218 of the Criminal Code, an abortion is generally punishable in Germany – unless it takes place within the first twelve weeks and the woman has sought advice beforehand. Abortion is also not a criminal offense if there are medical reasons or if it is carried out because of rape.
An expert commission set up by the traffic light coalition will present recommendations next Monday on whether the basic criminal liability should remain.