Towards A Cultural History Of Abortion

In this introductory chapter I will discuss, first, the pivotal position of abortion and its regulation in the sociopolitical history of modern Germany and subsequently comment critically on the historiography of abortion relating to Germany and beyond, the 1920s but also to earlier and later periods. This is followed by pointing out the major theoretical and methodological approaches used in my study. Finally I elucidate, chapter by chapter, the narrative thread and the structure of the argument of the study which follows.

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Cultural Representation

Abortion On Stage, Screen And In Fiction

This chapter will explore the way events surrounding abortion were portrayed in Weimar popular culture and compare it with the meaning women themselves attached to the operation. It seems that there was a remarkable disparity between women's perceptions (as we will see in Chapters 5 and 6 below) and the way abortion featured in most cultural productions at the time, and the question is why this was the case. Did scriptwriters, directors, playwrights and authors pay little heed to women's own views? Or was it the case that while films, plays and novels may have entertained their female spectators or readers, they did not influence their opinion?

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Medical Termination Of Pregnancy

Theory And Practice

Abortion narratives in popular novels, plays and films conveyed powerful messages about the bleakness, even tragedy, of the event, though this was at odds with most women's own perceptions. The negative images were largely informed by the medical discourse which had also shaped legal theory and judicial practice, the political debate, as well as population and health policies. In the dominant positivist culture which believed in the inevitability of progress in general and the advances of medical science in particular, physicians' advances in epidemiology and insights into hygiene (as well as social hygiene) were central to public health policies.1 Similarly, their views on public health dominated the public debate on abortion. The influence of the profession on opinion makers in this area was not new; it had gradually become more powerful since the first decade of the twentieth century, when the panic over the declining birth rate led the authorities to consult doctors, often in preference to churchmen or economists, to explain the causes of and remedies for the startling demographic change. This was not surprising since enterprising doctors had begun very early on to conduct their own surveys on sexual and birth control practices; hospital consultants and district medical officials collected and interpreted statistics of illegal miscarriages and many medics came up with practical programmes to reverse the fertility trend.2 But soon government officials and other opinion formers also began to adopt medical terminology in their policy statements. For example, the trend towards smaller families was expressed in organicist terms and pathologized: the nation became the Volkskörper, the social body, and it was presented as afflicted by the disease of the declining birth rate, also called an 'ethical degeneration'.3

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Abortion In The Marketplace

Lay Practitioners And Doctors Compete

This chapter will discuss the genesis of Kurierfreiheit as part of the process of professionalization of medicine in the nineteenth century and analyse the reasons for the anti-quackery campaign from the turn of the last century to shore up medical influence, especially in the politically sensitive area of reproductive health. I argue that abortion proved a suitable platform for academic medicine to discredit and marginalize lay practitioners in an attempt to medicalize all terminations of pregnancy. Lay abortionists rather than aborting women became the new target of anti-abortionists and abortion reformers alike who usually accused them of leading women astray, of greed and ignorance. This is compared to how lay abortion practice affected women themselves especially with respect to gender, class and culture. Lastly, career paths of 'wise men' and 'wise women' are discussed, as is their safety record, methods used and the price they demanded.

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Women's Own Voices

Female Perceptions Of Abortion

This chapter focuses on how women perceived menstruation, conception and abortion and the way they conveyed sensory experiences in words, both adopting and contesting orthodox medical discourse by employing expressions of earlier times which were also used by abortion entrepreneurs. I argue below that women accused of abortion spoke in two quite different ways: many participated in 'a new mentality of modernity';6 that is, they were apparently familiar with the scientific medical language of reproduction and fertility control through their consumption of popular culture and their participation in the welfare state, visiting sick fund doctors, sex advice centres or ante- and postnatal welfare clinics. Many women used a thoroughly modern vocabulary which fitted the official terminology, even though we cannot be certain that they meant the same things by them as doctors or lawyers did. Many women, on the other hand, remained tenaciously attached to older notions of menstruation, articulating ideas which had fallen out of use in medical textbooks although they were conspicuous in advertisements for abortifacients and abortion services which inundated the local press. Moreover, occasionally the very woman who had given a thoroughly well-informed statement befitting the modernity of Weimar Germany, in a later interview lapsed bewilderingly into a traditional mode of expression, evoking ideas and images from the natural world as if modern objective science had not yet existed. How this occurred and what this might signify is at the core of this chapter.

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Abortion As An Everyday Experience In Village Life

A Case Study From Hesse

In what the press called a 'monster case', Willy and Hedwig were just two of ninety-three defendants tried in court in December 1924 for criminal abortion. Apart from the abortionist, Frau Hermine Kastner and her accomplice, her husband Adolf, fifty-four women and thirty-seven husbands or lovers faced charges: the women for having undergone an abortion, the men for aiding and abetting them. Impressive as this array of accused is, the real number of women who underwent an abortion performed by the Kastners was likely to have been larger still, since it was more than likely that not all abortions came to the notice of the authorities. The trial took place in Limburg in the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau, 45 km north of Frankfurt; the aborting women, however, resided in seventeen villages to the south and southeast of Limburg, the so-called Limburger Becken (Limburg basin).

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Abortion In Early Twentieth-Century Germany

Continuity And Change

Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany also aims to link the experiential with the symbolic and discursive dimension of body history, showing how abortion was portrayed, practised and punished in Weimar Germany, but also, more importantly, how it was experienced and talked about by aborting women themselves. Abortion is thus explored both in the way it manifested itself publicly — as, for example, in sentencing policy or in medical discussions — and the way it was experienced privately by the historical actors, aborting women and their helpers. The story told is composed of many different narratives and informed by different viewpoints which are important for a cultural approach to this subject, the attempt to interpret the tapestry of different meanings by women and men involved in reproductive decisions.

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