3 - Women's Literary Interventions in Abortion Debates

Summary

While the Subject of this book is depictions and perceptions of motherhood in the Weimar Republic, discourses of motherhood were inextricably entwined during this period with debates about access to abortion and the use of contraception. This chapter analyzes the engagement with public debates about abortion in four literary works written by, and largely for, women: Irmgard Keun's Gilgi—eine von uns (1931; Gilgi, One of Us, 2019), Vicki Baum's stud. chem. Helene Willfüer (Helene Willfüer, Student of Chemistry, 1928), Elfriede Brüning's Kleine Leute (Ordinary People, written 1932–33, first published 1970), and Else Kienle's Frauen: Aus dem Tagebuch einer Ärztin (Women: From the Diary of a Female Doctor, 1932). Discourses around abortion in the Weimar Republic bridged feminist, socialist, and conservative perspectives and offer important insights into the ways in which women approached broader questions of motherhood and reproductive choices. In this chapter, I contend that two principal sets of arguments in favor of liberalizing abortion laws emerge: one based on class inequality and the other more explicitly on women's rights. Yet as I show, both sets of arguments are tempered by a conditional endorsement of abortion access reserved for instances of extreme hardship or medical emergency. The reluctance to support unconditional access to abortion reflects the pragmatic approach found across the Weimar-era socialist press, in which writers and campaigners attempted to package their calls for reform in a way that was more palatable to a public that remained largely supportive of the idea that motherhood represented women's natural role in society. Appeals to the notion of maternal instinct and a pragmatic desire to avoid censorship or legal repercussions moderate the texts’ otherwise strong advocacy for legal access to abortion, and the strategy of presenting abortion as a last resort in extreme circumstances anticipates later feminist arguments against Paragraph 218 in the post–Second World War Federal Republic of Germany.

Opposition to Paragraph 218 in the Weimar Republic

Access to abortion and contraception had been a political issue for the German women's movements since the pre–First World War period. Members of the sex reform movement were among the most vocal opponents of Paragraph 218, which had outlawed abortion since the law's introduction in 1871 with the establishment of a united German state.