[Medical claims and women's experience. Physician-performed abortions in the Weimar Republic]

Abstract

The campaign for abortion reform in the Weimar Republic occasioned passionate disputes between factions supporting and opposing liberalization of abortion laws. Nevertheless, both camps agreed on one issue: that doctors, and only doctors, should be authorized to terminate a pregnancy. The implication was that an operation induced by a registered medical practitioner was safe, while so-called back-street operations were always dangerous. By and large, this view has also been accepted by historians, often uncritically. This article shows that evidence of the very real risks of terminating a pregnancy was open to cultural and political manipulation. The claims of academic physicians were often contradictory: on the one hand, they dismissed the risks of medical procedures as a way of fighting lay abortions; on the other hand, they exaggerated these risks as a way of explaining unsuccessful surgeries. Using a case study from Bavaria at the beginning of the Republic, this article shows the ambiguous role doctors played and the biased view of the courts. It also sheds light on the experience of abortion-seeking women, whose interests were largely ignored by the law enforcement agencies.