Claudia Roesch. Journal of Modern European History. Volume 17, Issue 3. June 2019.
Hans Harmsen, the honorary president of Pro Famila—the West German family planning association—wrote this in a paper about the demographic implications of abortion, which he presented at various scientific conferences and expert hearings between 1978 and 1980. He argued that despite a more liberal abortion law, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had higher birth rates. Therefore, he concluded, in order to stem declining birth rates, the Federal Republic needed to reform existing regulations and offer financial aid to young families rather than restrict access to family planning.
Harmsen—a retired professor of social hygiene—was a contested figure, as he had actively supported coercive sterilizations during National Socialism and afterwards lobbied for the legalization of eugenic sterilizations. Nevertheless, his attitude towards legal abortion had shifted significantly from rejecting it as murder in 1927 to proposing legalization by 1971. His argument in 1980 illustrates first that he associated reproductive behaviour with demographics, especially with a noticeable decline in fertility rates since 1964. Second, compared internationally, West German regulations were usually stricter than policies in other countries (mainly the GDR, the United Kingdom and United States, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Sweden, and Denmark). Third, civil associations like Pro Familia took a pragmatic approach by arguing that women would limit their family size whether or not they had access to reliable contraception or safe abortions.
This article examines the role of the family planning association Pro Familia within the West German abortion reform process of the 1970s and 1980s. It looks at how Pro Familia navigated through the restrictive legal and political frameworks to provide women with the ability to decide about abortions while the organization underwent significant institutional changes. First, it offers an overview of Pro Familia and the German abortion debate. Second, it discusses German abortion legislation prior to the 1970s reform. Third, it examines how Pro Familia negotiated questions of decision-making during the legal reform period from 1970 until 1977. Fourth, it explores the practical side of mandatory counselling and analyses impediments to women’s access to abortion after legal reform.
Pro Familia and the German Abortion Debates
Pro Familia—the German Society for Marriage and Family—came into being in 1952 through the work of Berlin physician Anne-Marie Durand-Wever and Kassel social worker Ilse Lederer. Lederer convinced Hans Harmsen to get involved as well. Harmsen and Durand-Wever had known each other since they had served on a local committee for birth control in Berlin in 1931, and all three had established local family planning clinics in their respective hometowns. Durand-Wever and Lederer had met American birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger at a conference of the British Family Planning Association in Cheltenham, England, in 1948. This inspired them to initiate a German council for birth control. Sanger offered them financial incentives to set up an organization modelled on the American Planned Parenthood Federation. Until 1967, Pro Familia was mainly an association of liberal medical professionals engaged in organizing a few family planning clinics in urban areas like Berlin, Hamburg, Kassel, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart. Its main objective was to fight the ‘epidemic of illegal abortions’ among German women by providing contraceptives. In this, Pro Familia differed from the American and International Planned Parenthood Federations (IPPF), which insisted that fighting overpopulation was their major objective.
Yet, Pro Familia was one of the first organizations in post-war West Germany to publicly call for abortion law reform. It collaborated with the Federal Government to provide sex education curricula and family planning as part of development aid and to model pregnancy counselling. Through these steps, Pro Familia became the most prominent provider of mandatory abortion counselling after the 1976 reform. The organization stood at the vanguard of giving women access to safe abortions while providing expert advice to the Federal Government.
Historical research on abortion reform in West Germany has focused on the women’s movement or the prominent role Catholic and Protestant Churches played in the controversy. In an insightful study of the anti-abortion movement, anthropologist Michi Knecht illustrated that its activists believed legal abortion to be a slippery slope towards moral decline. Yet, researchers have thus far paid little attention to Pro Familia’s role in the abortion controversy; there is no concise history of the organization. Sociologist and former Pro Familia president Daphne Hahn critically evaluated abortion policies in both German states in the context of debates about legal sterilization. She argued that the shift from eugenic reasoning in the 1950s towards arguments promising individual families health, happiness, and greater self-fulfilment were pretexts to implement bio-political programmes. Meanwhile, Dagmar Herzog demonstrated in her work that in the post-war years a conservative outlook on sexuality and the student movement’s emphasis on sexual liberation both derived from a desire to distance oneself from the Nazi regime. A number of studies have looked at Pro Familia’s first president Harmsen and his involvement in the Nazi sterilization campaigns. But most end in 1937 or only focus on his academic work.
Pro Familia’s role in the abortion reform movement had a strong impact on women’s changing options of reproductive decision-making. Reproductive decision-making includes deciding whether to plan one’s family at all, which contraceptives to use, whether to have an abortion, or, in the case of infertility, whether to use artificial reproductive technologies. Decision-making here is a social interaction and a deliberate process of choosing between two or more alternatives after a period of reflection. The choices available, as well as the methods of choosing, are shaped by social, cultural and legal norms, discursive practices, and resources such as access to knowledge or counselling. While women have always chosen abortions, the idea that having children is something to actively plan for only emerged in the mid-20th century. Controversies often revolved around three important issues: who gets to make the final decision—the woman, her doctor, her partner, the state; which resources women access to make a decision; and which narratives of decision-making are considered legitimate.
Significantly, reproductive decisions, especially those concerning abortion, mark women’s bodies as reproductive bodies. Legal reform processes in the 1970s shifted the frameworks in which women made those decisions between discourses on individual rights and bio-political attempts to structure populations. While it exceeds the scope of the present study to investigate individual decisions for or against an abortion, this history of Pro Familia’s activism allows us to trace shifts in discursive frameworks that allowed women to make reproductive decision.
Abortion before legalization, 1871-1969
Abortion was illegal in the German Empire from its founding in 1871, codified in §218. After the First World War, feminists and left-wing parties began campaigning for its legalization, using slogans like ‘Dein Körper gehört dir’ (Your body belongs to you) to demand that women gain control over their own bodies. Meanwhile, conservative and Christian anti-abortion campaigners maintained that abortion was murder. In 1926, §218 governing abortion was reformed to reduce penalties and allow exceptions if an abortion was deemed to be medically necessary. During National Socialism, performing abortions on able-bodied women became punishable by incarceration in concentration camps or execution, while the regime allowed ‘therapeutic’ abortions on women it deemed unfit for eugenic reasons—revealing the Nazis’ juxtaposition between pronatalism and antinatalism by categorizing the German population into ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ members.
Immediately after the war, illegal abortion rates exploded. Observers estimated one million clandestine procedures a year. While abortion became easily accessible in the Soviet occupation zone, the Western zones maintained §218 from the Weimar period—allowing abortion only when medically indicated and after the pregnant woman had appeared before a commission of the local medical chamber.
The first initiative to reform §218 came from legal experts. As part of the 1960s penal reform, an expert commission for the Federal Ministry of Justice suggested that abortion should be legalized in cases of rape or incest, the so-called criminal indication. After religious groups and conservative physicians protested vehemently, this suggestion did not make it into the final reform package. But it sparked a wider public debate about the legitimacy of terminating pregnancies. The first civic organization to demand that abortion should be legal was the Humanist Union—founded in 1961 by writers, liberal intellectuals, and left-liberal politicians for the purpose of securing human dignity, self-determination, and the separation of church and state.
However, until 1969, the family planning association Pro Familia did not demand legalization. On the contrary, it maintained that its goal was to fight abortion by distributing contraceptives. In 1962, the Frankfurt Pro Familia chapter had claimed that the West German law allowing abortion only when medically necessary was the best solution. Severe penalties like those in Southern European countries, they argued, would not keep women from having illegal abortions. While Scandinavia allowed abortions for social and medical reasons and the procedure was legal in the Eastern Bloc, Pro Familia Frankfurt maintained that these practices only increased illegal abortions. In their view, women were too embarrassed to appear before doctors’ committees and this would cause women further complications and emotional distress. In the early 1960s, then, Pro Familia did not consider abortion an option women should be able to choose. Instead, it treated it as a medical procedure that should be available only in medical emergencies as determined by physicians. From its paternalistic point of view, the organization aimed to protect women from making decisions they would feel embarrassed about.
In 1967, the association’s president Hans Harmsen shifted his position and began to accept legal abortions up to the 8th week of gestation. This was a dramatic turn: In the 1930s, he had publicly rejected both euthanasia and therapeutic abortions as murder. And in the 1950s, he had maintained that even legal abortion, at this point mainly performed with a Dilation and Curette (D&C) procedure, posed a danger to women’s health. Yet, after attending an IPPF conference in Santiago de Chile in April 1967, Harmsen changed his mind. There he had collected scientific evidence to argue that biologically and legally, foetal life would not begin until the 8th week of gestation. Moreover, as he explained in private correspondence with the organization’s lawyer Heinrich Ackermann, he expected that within a few years a hormonal abortion pill would replace D&C, which he considered too dangerous. He also maintained that no child should be born into a family where it was not wanted. To make this point, he drew on claims that unwanted children were unloved and prone to mental illness, leading to high costs for the welfare state. Harmsen, however, did not seek to broaden women’s abilities to control their bodies. Instead, he continued to distinguish between children that should be born and those that should not. While he had emphasized since the 1950s that the health and happiness of individual families were his major concerns, he still categorized potential mothers and their babies according to qualitative criteria determined by male experts the way eugenicists had done in the 1920s and 1930s. Although Pro Familia did not follow Harmsen in his acceptance of legal abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, it did treat abortion as an issue to be decided by a physician rather than the pregnant woman herself. It perceived the procedure from a medical and bio-political angle by looking at complication rates and the situation of unwanted children.
The reform phase, 1970-1974
In 1967, Pro Familia did not follow Harmsen’s lead mainly because it wished to connect to more conservative gynaecologists’ associations. Yet by 1971, among Pro Familia members attitudes on how to reform §218 were changing. Two things had happened to precipitate new views. First, Pro Familia members had observed the legalization of abortion elsewhere, mainly in Great Britain (1967) and the state of New York (1970). Second, in 1971, the second wave of the women’s movement had made the demand for legal abortion its highest priority, and younger female members openly supported this.
That same year, the social-liberal coalition government under Willy Brandt (1969-1974) began to reform laws governing sexuality (i.e. decriminalizing homosexuality, lifting the ban on advertisement for contraceptives), and abortion became an issue of public debate. An expert commission for the Ministry of Justice suggested that abortion should remain illegal but that women and doctors should go unpunished if certain indications applied. This came to be known as the Indikationslösung (indication-based solution), for which medical professionals made a diagnosis and then determined whether the reasons for ending a pregnancy were valid.
This solution engendered heated debates about which indications to consider. Commentators within Pro Familia all agreed that medical, criminal, and child-related indications (a euphemism for disabilities caused by either genetic or environmental factors) should be valid. A resolution by the Pro Familia medical committee in 1970 further proposed that a broad social-medical indication should include non-medical reasons. Meanwhile, the president of Pro Familia Berlin Ulrich Wolff drew up a long list of indications. These included the woman’s age (younger than 16 or older than 40), financial difficulties, and psychological reasons. If the woman already had four or more children or was suicidal, if her career or education were under threat, or if the child would be born into an ‘anti-social’, poor or criminal environment abortion ought to be permitted. An expert commission consisting of a doctor, a psychiatrist, a social worker, and (if the pregnant woman was below 21) an educator would determine whether an indication applied. Nowhere in these suggestions was there any room for a woman herself to choose an abortion. Instead, experts were to decide whether her wish to end a pregnancy was legitimate.
Meanwhile, an alternative draft by legal experts in the Liberal Party suggested that up to the 12th week of gestation abortion be completely legalized (the so-called Fristenlösung or term-based solution) after a woman underwent mandatory counselling. The major difference between the Fristenlösung and the Indikationslösung was who ultimately made the decision. In the term-based solution (as it was practised in the GDR since 1972), the pregnant woman was granted the right to make the final decision about whether to carry the pregnancy. If the woman opted for an abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy, she did not have to give any reasons. When the Pro Familia board of directors voted on the abortion question in 1971, a majority (26) favoured the term-based solution, while a minority (18) voted for an indication-based solution, and only one person voted for eliminating all legal restrictions.
Honorary president Harmsen, who, in 1967, had advocated a liberal indication-based reform, spoke out for a term-based solution in 1971. On a visit to the United States in July 1970, just when the state of New York legalized abortion up to 24 weeks gestation, he had visited a women’s health clinic. As a firsthand witness, Harmsen noted that, contrary to his own predictions, neither complication rates nor illegal abortions rose as a result of legalization. Instead, he saw professionals in New York performing legal abortions in safe and clinical environments. Also, complication rates dropped as American doctors turned to vacuum aspiration over D&C and gained more experience with the new procedure. Harmsen’s shift to supporting a term-based solution, therefore, was driven by practical and bio-political considerations rather than women’s rights.
At the same time, journalist Alice Schwarzer made abortion reform the major concern of the new feminist movement. The movement in West Germany emerged in 1968 out of the student movement, when female students with children started to fight for better day-care facilities to coordinate childcare, and political activism. Schwarzer’s initiatives to make abortion legal drew working women, working-class women, and high school students to the university-based movement. Having lived in Paris, Schwarzer copied the French campaign for legal abortion in which women admitted to having undergone an illegal procedure. In a famous cover story of June 1971, the journal Stern published her campaign demands along with photos of women who admitted to having ended a pregnancy and who wished to have Wunschkinder (wanted children) only. They held a signed pledge demanding safe and legal abortion covered by health insurance, sex education. and access to contraception for all. Arguing that millions of women underwent illegal and unsafe procedures while wealthy women could afford to travel abroad for legal abortions, the campaign framed abortion as a medical and social justice issue.
In the 1970s, West German women most commonly travelled to the Netherlands, Yugoslavia. and England to have abortions. While a legal abortion in a private clinic in London required an airplane flight and a hotel stay that could cost up to 1600 DM (US$640 in 1975), public hospitals in Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Belgrade, which could be reached in a 1-day car-ride from southern Germany, charged around 500 DM (US$200). In the Netherlands, legal abortion in the first 10 weeks of gestation could be obtained in free clinics for 300-400 DM (US$120-US$160). Starting in 1975, Pro Familia referred women to a feminist health initiative in Frankfurt that organized bus rides to an abortion clinic in The Hague. In 1976, the association started passing out a list of recommended clinics obtained from its Dutch partner organization. By backing these campaigns, Pro Familia counsellors displayed an awareness that women, in practice, made their own decisions about ending pregnancies; staff members supported them in putting their decisions into action.
By 1973, women in the governing Social Democratic Party and the Liberal Party favoured the Fristenlösung as a means to extend women’s right to choose. The Ministry of Justice and Protestant churches supported a liberal indication-based model, while the Christian Democratic opposition campaigned for a strict indication-based solution. The Catholic Church and its charities led the fight against any form of legalization. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference publicly criticized the feminist campaign of 1971, complaining that ‘women who were guilty of destroying unborn life not because of a crisis of conscience but out of convenience and lifestyle choices are seeking public fame for their crimes’. They saw legal abortion as a step towards enabling women to choose a lifestyle outside the traditional realms of family and motherhood.
Drawing on campaigns against pornography, nudity in film, and contraceptives in the early Federal Republic, Catholic dignitaries sought to influence congregations and politicians via pastoral letters, church newspapers, opinion pieces in the mainstream press, graphic posters, letter campaigns, and direct outreach to parliamentary representatives. The diocese of Münster in Westphalia became the centre of anti-abortion activism. On the local level, it decreed that no hospital with Catholic sponsorship was to perform abortions, while threatened to organize walkouts among the nursing staff at the university training hospital. These initiatives were intended to undermine the reform process and prevent women from having abortions by restricting their access to the procedure.
Despite Catholic and conservative protests, in 1974, the Bundestag passed a law allowing the Fristenlösung, which included a budget for supportive measures like sex education and crisis pregnancy counselling. Although Minister of Justice Hans-Jochen Vogel insisted that the state was not relinquishing its protection of unborn life by decriminalizing first-trimester abortions, after only 3 days the Constitutional Court issued a stay on the reform law. Six months later, it ruled that a term-based solution put a woman’s right to self-determination above a foetus’ right to life and was, therefore, unconstitutional. This ruling reinforced the previous legal understanding that the foetus was a person from conception. Exceptions to the law were only allowed in an indication-based model that considered foetal rights as important as the pregnant woman’s life. In 1976, the German parliament passed a revised reform bill granting women freedom from prosecution if they had undergone an abortion within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and could prove a medical, eugenic, or criminal indication or a so-called Notlagenindikation (emergency indication). Lawmakers emphasized that an emergency indication did not pertain to social conditions because these could be fixed by the welfare state.
According to the final reform bill, a physician had to diagnose an indication. After that, the woman had to undergo mandatory counselling and consider all alternative support measures. Then, she had to find a second physician who would confirm the indication and perform the abortion, although the latter would not be legally bound to accept the first doctor’s diagnosis and could decide not to support the abortion request based on their personal conscience. Pro Familia was not satisfied with the indication-based solution because it allowed doctors to refuse to perform abortions. This meant that clinics, especially those run by religious organizations, could direct their staff to refuse to perform all abortions or perform only those that were medically indicated. Pro Familia feared that physicians’ conscientious refusal to support women’s abortion requests would lead to free-standing abortion clinics where doctors, who were willing to perform the procedure for a profit, turned abortion into a business venture.
Pro Familia’s critique of the indication-based solution in 1976 resulted from deliberations within the organization itself. While up until 1970, members had advocated a liberal Indikationslösung that would leave the final decision to a woman’s physician, the abortion question was now being framed as a woman’s right to choose. The lack of consensus over which indications should be applicable, the feminist movement’s effective publicity campaign, as well as suggestions by lawyers in the Liberal Party and women Social Democrats had initiated that change. Reports about the reforms in Great Britain and New York and stories about German women seeking abortions abroad all demonstrated that women were able to decide about abortions. Thus, although Pro Familia was not among the avant-garde demanding women’s rights, its support of the Fristenlösung in 1971 did align its position with such demands; the organization affirmed that women could make the decision to have an abortion for themselves, and that Pro Familia would provide them with resources to do so.
Introducing compulsory crisis pregnancy counselling, 1974-1977
From 1970, Pro Familia had insisted that any reform of §218 had to include mandatory counselling to educate women about contraceptives. Even before the reform bill passed, the organization had started to offer advice to women considering abortion. A 1972 brochure explained the aim of Pro Familia’s services: ‘to give mature citizens an aid in decision-making’. It further explained what staff could do for pregnant women, including informing women of the medical risk factors, referring them to abortion providers, supporting those who chose to carry their child to term, assisting with paperwork in cases that were medically necessary, and finding a physician willing to perform the procedure. Pro Familia’s counselling programme illustrated that it wanted pregnant women to make the decision so that only wanted children would be born.
During the reform process, Pro Familia officials actively sought to cooperate with the Federal Government. From 1974 to 1979, they took part in a model trial to set up crisis pregnancy counselling sponsored by the Bundeszentrale für gesundheitliche Aufklärung (Federal Agency for Health Education). The Workers’ Welfare Association (Arbeiterwohlfahrt), Protestant and Catholic charities (Diakonie and Caritas), a health insurance company (AOK), and public health agencies were also involved. For Pro Familia, the trials required that it open 35 new facilities by 1975 and 64 more by 1979. The organization hired new staff trained in social sciences, social work, and pedagogy rather than medicine. The counsellors were often recent university graduates who had been greatly affected by the student and feminist movement.
Although the federal government passed the abortion reform law, it left the formal vetting of counselling agencies to the states. In Catholic Bavaria, only religious charities were accredited. The latter primarily offered financial aid to pregnant women so that women would choose to carry the pregnancy to term. Pro Familia complained that this practice prompted ‘abortion tourism’ within Germany from states governed by Christian Democrats to Social Democratic states (i.e. Bremen or Hamburg). It also drove up the costs for women seeking abortions in conservative areas who had to travel further to access the procedure. Meanwhile, the Catholic charity Caritas claimed that 60% of women who visited with its counsellors chose to keep the pregnancy, compared to 80% of women choosing abortion after they attended Pro Familia counselling. Caritas counsellors assumed that women knew beforehand which organization to select: If they wanted to keep the child but needed financial support, they sought out Caritas; if they were determined to have an abortion, they went to Pro Familia instead. Of course, this choice of counsellors was only available in areas where both agencies were accredited.
Whereas both the federal law and religious organizations envisioned counselling as a means to keep women from having abortions, Pro Familia maintained that it wanted women to have a real choice. An outline for Pro Familia’s model counselling from April 1974 (right after the term-solution was passed) instructed counsellors to remain neutral and offer women aid in decision-making. They were to inform women about the risk of complications for both abortion and giving birth, explain abortion procedures, consider psychological, financial, and social aspects of each option, offer psychological relief, and, most importantly, always accept a woman’s decision. In this draft, counselling was meant to be a resource for decision-making: while the counsellor provided information and decision-making strategies, the final decision lay with the women.
However, at Pro Familia’s annual 1975 meeting, it became apparent that the reform bill had granted considerable power to counsellors since women needed them to sign a certificate before they could proceed with an abortion. The minutes of the meeting made it clear that Pro Familia regarded social workers as more qualified to recognize an emergency indication than physicians, since they knew all available welfare programmes. Social workers, the minutes further noted, should involve a woman’s partner, arrange for financial aid so that the woman could keep her pregnancy, offer legal advice, help in finding a clinic, and provide contraceptives. As counsellors were the ones who confirmed an emergency indication, they theoretically held the power to deny women access to legal abortion. Legislators and Pro Familia, then, still felt that a woman had to be in a crisis to opt for an abortion.
At the 1976 annual meeting, however, Pro Familia members unanimously voted to redefine the organization’s statement of purpose to include crisis pregnancy counselling: ‘it is Pro Familia’s intention to enable a woman to make a real decision for herself and to offer her practical assistance within the legal framework, no matter how she decides’. With this vote, Pro Familia shifted its goals of crisis pregnancy counselling from being a resource for decision-making mainly intended to motivate women to keep their pregnancies to helping women realize their choice of abortion. In the early stages of the debate, medical experts had been the ones to decide whether an abortion was legitimate. Now, 6 years later, the main goal of crisis counselling was to enable women to make their own decisions in a crisis. The feminist movement’s campaign and the hiring of new staff trained in the social sciences had spurred these changes in Pro Familia’s views.
Enabling decision-making after legal reform, 1977-1983
Pro Familia’s involvement with pregnancy crisis counselling changed the organization on several levels. Elected officials in the organization’s local boards who did not approve of its progressive position on abortion refrained from running for re-election or lost majorities when feminists entered local chapters. In the organization’s national and state boards, power shifted from medically trained personnel to the new staff. Male physicians like Hans Harmsen took a backseat when they lost their influence in the association.
A larger percentage of clients now sought help with crisis pregnancies. According to M.D. Lille-Lore Schmitt-Schiek, who wrote a report about her counselling experience at the Cologne chapter in 1977, the major challenge was that women did not voluntarily attend these sessions. Schmitt-Schiek noted that women felt defensive about their decision to have an abortion:
A woman who has already decided to have an abortion—and that is the majority of women among our clients—considers counselling an annoying necessity. Even with this attitude, she is able to suppress her actual conflict. The counsellor needs an especially high degree of empathy, open-mindedness and conversational skills to manage the situation. Only then can a meaningful conversation begin; only then can the decision be reflected on and worked out together with the client; only then is there a chance to shed light on the basic conflict, to reduce fears and to create motivation for the future use of a contraceptive that fits the woman’s physical and mental needs.
For the majority of women, crisis pregnancy counselling was just a bureaucratic hurdle standing in the way of the actual abortion. At the same time, the counsellor assumed that every woman who attended counselling had an underlying conflict. This assumption pathologized women experiencing an unwanted pregnancy, suggesting that every woman naturally wanted to be a mother. If she did not, there had to be some psychological, social, or financial crisis that needed to be solved. Although women were allowed to choose abortions, they were not regarded as healthy and fully competent adults.
Counsellors now had to learn how to come to terms with their own attitudes towards abortion. They debated whether every abortion decision presented a crisis: Counsellors with a feminist background believed that a woman should not feel conflicted about abortion regardless of her reasons while older, medically trained staff members wanted to find and fix the woman’s problems first. In practice, however, cases were often not so clear-cut. The minutes of a 1982 experience-exchange meeting among counsellors revealed that many women faced a host of conflicts in the counselling sessions, ranging from a lack of knowledge about the legal frameworks, fear of social stigma, concerns about the risks of the procedure, conflicts with their partners and families, worries about financial circumstances, or problems at school or at work. Counsellors were under time pressure to recognize and solve these conflicts. The staff concluded that counsellors should not confuse their own political attitudes with women’s needs, nor should they offer only information as this would make women feel alone with their problems. Instead, many women desired referrals to specific abortion providers as they had already made the decision to have an abortion.
For Pro Familia’s public image, it remained important to insist that women attending crisis pregnancy counselling suffered from multiple conflicts, since critics of abortion reform assumed that—as Catholic campaigns had claimed—women sought abortions merely for selfish reasons. Pro Familia tried to counter this narrative by arguing that every unwanted pregnancy was the result of inadequate sex education or contraceptive failure. Abortion was one possible path that desperate women should be able to choose to get out of an emergency situation. A report to the Ministry of Justice noted that the majority of women who came to crisis pregnancy counselling were married with children, were over the age of 35, and had been careless with contraception, either because they believed themselves to be in menopause or feared the side effects of birth control pills and now worried that their advanced maternal age might raise the likelihood that their child might suffer from a disability. While this portrayal put blame for unplanned pregnancies on women’s misconceptions about contraception, it still emphasized that women were not trying to avoid motherhood. Likewise, a report from the Hamburg affiliate depicted the typical woman seeking an abortion as a mother of two teenagers who was working to support her family because her husband was unemployed. This archetypical woman did not try to avoid motherhood. She did not seek an abortion out of convenience or as a lifestyle choice, but out of responsibility towards her already existing family. Her desire for an abortion seemed legitimate, as she was not acting out of selfish reasons. A short-term loan, like those offered by state or church-sponsored foundations to protect unborn life, was not enough to fix her problems. Consequently, although Pro Familia insisted that it wanted to enable women to make reproductive decisions, its official narratives legitimized abortion only as a solution to emergencies.
While there is no evidence that Pro Familia affiliates ever denied women certificates for mandatory counselling, many women found it difficult to locate a clinic to perform an abortion as clinics often claimed to have no capacities. The new Christian-Liberal coalition under Helmut Kohl (1982-1998) campaigned to end public health insurance coverage for abortions with Notlagenindikation, arguing that these procedures were elective. In 1983, the Constitutional Court ruled that public health insurance coverage of non-therapeutic abortions was illegal. Alongside feminist health groups and the Humanist Union, Pro Familia was at the forefront of protests against this ruling, demanding unrestricted abortion access and full health insurance coverage. At a demonstration in Karlsruhe in 1983, critics argued that the indication-based law did not meet women’s needs. Instead, they demanded free access to abortions, contraceptives, and counselling as a means to lowering abortion rates. Pro Familia’s stance in this debate shows that it still sought to eliminate the need for abortions. If women’s circumstances changed, Pro Familia argued, they would not need to undergo an abortion, reinforcing the view that abortion was only legitimate in emergencies. While Pro Familia maintained that women should make the final decision about an abortion themselves, the organization did not frame abortion as a woman’s right. Rather, it cast women who chose abortion as being in crisis and in need of outside help to make and carry out their decision. Thus, Pro Familia regarded the access to legal abortion not as a way to enable women to make their own decision, but as a pragmatic necessity to fix emergencies that could have been avoided with more education, better contraception, and financial support from the welfare state.
Conclusion
From 1976 on, anti-abortion critics within West Germany maintained that abortion on demand was practically legal. Legally, of course, women were only exempt from punishment if medical, eugenic, criminal, or social indications applied. Pro Familia had been a key player in initiating the reform of §218 and extending women’s access to legal abortion. On a practical level, the reform had increased women’s ability to control their own reproduction. However, its (mandatory) crisis pregnancy counselling turned out not to be a resource for decision-making but rather for putting a decision into practice.
On a policy level, Pro Familia maintained that abortion was an emergency measure to be utilized if contraception had failed. It regarded women facing an unwanted pregnancy as in crisis. Pro Familia’s official policy did not frame the abortion question as a women’s rights issue, even though individual actors within the organization considered their work feminist advocacy. Instead, Pro Familia officials continued to cast access to legal abortion as a question of welfare policy to counter Catholic claims that women sought abortions out of convenience. From the 1960s on, Pro Familia members argued that they viewed abortion from the perspective of the child who should not be born into an ‘anti-social’ environment. Women should consciously decide about their pregnancy not because it was their right to do so, but because children should be wanted. While the fight for legal abortion in the 1970s was not overtly bio-political, it was still treated as an issue of public welfare. The fact that 1970s feminists also depicted abortion as a social right and medical issue shows that this was the only way a pro-abortion position could be expressed within the West German discourse. The strong influence of the Catholic Church on public opinion and a tradition of defining abortion as murder since the 1920s significantly narrowed the discourse. Framing abortion as an issue of individual women’s rights was not a successful strategy, as the defeat of the 1975 reform bill shows. The social welfare approach constituted a compromise between legal restrictions and practical ways to circumvent them.
In practice, women gained greater control over their reproduction, but not out of a conviction that women could best decide about their bodies. Instead, women’s ability to make their own decisions increased as more compromises were adopted in the long-term debate on legal abortion.
Increasing women’s agency did not mean that Pro Familia endorsed abortion. Instead, the organization continued to perceive abortion as an unfortunate intervention to be avoided whenever possible with better counselling and preventive measures. Likewise, Pro Familia was critical of prenatal diagnostics. It explained in its journal in 1993 that women should decide whether to employ prenatal diagnostics in the early stages of pregnancy. Then they could be referred to a special counselling centre supported by Pro Familia. In this context, Pro Familia repeated the practice it had adopted when dealing with controversial reproductive technologies in the §218 debates. It developed a network of counselling agencies to serve as resources to assist women in making the right decisions in a difficult moral climate. The organization, thus, envisioned reproductive decisions as a challenge. The ideal decision was one that a woman made herself but not on her own. Pro Familia was there to assist her.