The end of an “absurd” and “from another time” text, which allowed “all the trolls and conspirators” to express themselves about abortion. This is how the Minister of Justice, Marco Buschmann, described the text – dating back to the Nazi era – repealed this Friday by the German Parliament. The controversial paragraph 219a of the Penal Code, adopted in 1933 shortly after Adolf Hitler assumed full powers, prohibited “advertising” for voluntary termination of pregnancy (abortion). And doctors detailing which abortion methods they employed risked “up to two years in prison or a fine”.
The governing coalition parties, the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the Liberals (FDP), voted to scrap the ban, while the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the far right (AfD) voted against. The repeal of paragraph 219a was a commitment of the coalition contract initialed in November by the governing parties.
Kristina Hänel, the “face” of the fight
The law passed will also make it possible to cancel the fines imposed in recent years on doctors who provided information on their website about abortion. Among the practitioners prosecuted is Kristina Hänel, a general practitioner in Giessen (west), who has become the “face” of the fight for the repeal of this provision after being sentenced to pay a fine of 6,000 euros. In June 2019, two Berlin gynecologists, Bettina Gaber and Verena Weyer, were each fined 2,000 euros for the same reason.
In this context, doctors preferred to remove all information on the subject from their website and refused to appear in the lists provided by family planning.
A path always strewn with pitfalls
Faced with the outcry caused by the legal setbacks of doctors, the government of ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel decided, at the beginning of 2019, to slightly relax this legislation by now allowing gynecologists and hospitals to warn on their website that they practice abortion. On the other hand, they were still prohibited from detailing what methods they used.
Abortion remains a path strewn with pitfalls in Germany, yet at the forefront of the fight for women’s rights in the 1970s. A woman wishing to have an abortion within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy must participate in a compulsory consultation in an approved center . The objective of this interview is “to encourage the woman to continue her pregnancy”, according to the legislator. Apart from exceptions (endangering the life of the mother, rape, etc.), abortion, the cost of which can reach several hundred euros, is not reimbursed by the health insurance funds. Some 100,000 abortions are performed each year in Germany, but the trend has been decreasing in recent years.