Murder or Human Rights? The controversy over abortion

No topic agitates modern democratic societies so regularly and reliably: the approval or, on the contrary, the ban on abortion is almost always good for a controversy, a demonstration, a protest. Ever since the development of medicine after 1945 made abortions performed by doctors not completely risk-free, but rather small standard interventions, there has been even more heated debate than before: Is it the human right of every pregnant woman to decide for or against an unborn child ? Or murder?

On March 21, 1973, WELT headlined: "Coalition for legal abortion in the first three months". After months of argument, the SPD and FDP parliamentary groups in the Bundestag decided to introduce a joint draft law to amend paragraph 218 of the Criminal Code. The core was a deadline regulation: “After that, every woman should be able to decide freely by the end of the third month of pregnancy whether she wants to have an abortion performed by the doctor.”

Even within the social-liberal government alliance, there had previously been violent dissonance: "The decision by the two coalition factions in favor of a deadline was made on Tuesday in separate meetings," reported the WELT parliamentary editorial team from Bonn: "The FDP, which had always advocated a deadline, announced its decision in the afternoon. In the SPD, on the other hand, where there are committed supporters of a deadline regulation as well as staunch supporters of an indication solution, consultations lasted from the afternoon into the evening hours.”

However, either the exhaustion, general or specific to this topic, or the unwillingness to position oneself, had consequences: “When the vote was taken, the ranks of the group were already thinned out considerably. In the presence of a maximum of 90 out of 242 parliamentary group members, only two SPD deputies spoke out against a time limit solution in this decision," leaked out from the closed meeting.

This lowered the value of the internal opinion: “Since the SPD parliamentary group did not vote in full, it cannot be seen from this result how large the number of implacable opponents of a deadline solution is.” The governing coalition of its own MPs was so uncertain that a roll-call vote was requested at the third reading of the corresponding Criminal Law Amendment Act on April 26, 1974 - a common means of reminding doubting parliamentarians of the faction coercion.

Nevertheless, in the end eight Social Democrats voted against the new regulation of paragraph 218, another ten abstained. Among them were well-known MdBs such as Hermann Schmitt-Vockenhausen, Vice President of the Bundestag and committed Catholic (No), the Minister of Justice Gerhard Jahn and his future successor Hans-Jochen Vogel as well as ex-government spokesman Conrad Ahlers (all three abstained).

The fact that the first Social Democratic Federal Chancellor, Willy Brandt, was wavering because of the Guillaume affair (and resigned less than two weeks later) does not prevent them from doing so; before the third reading on abortion law, there had been a current hour on the "suspicion of espionage against a senior employee at the Federal Chancellery".

Of the total of 518 deputies (including the representatives of West Berlin with restricted voting rights), 511 cast their votes. 261 voted for the draft of the red-yellow coalition – 23 fewer than the alliance had MdBs. 240 parliamentarians voted no – six more than the CDU-CSU opposition (of which, by the way, two West Berlin MPs also voted yes). The decision was therefore very close: just one vote over the so-called chancellor majority of 260 MPs at the time.

The law passed in this way did not last: as early as February 25, 1975, the Federal Constitutional Court declared the time limit solution to be unconstitutional. A good year later, the social-liberal coalition, led by Helmut Schmidt as Federal Chancellor, modified the law significantly towards a ban on abortion with precisely defined, medically determined exceptions - the so-called indication solution. This time all SPD parliamentarians present voted in favor, including Schmitt-Vockenhausen, Jahn, Vogel and Ahlers.

But the dispute over the weal and woe of abortion did not end this law either. Because there is still a dispute in Germany about paragraph 218, about its complete abolition or tightening. For example, the Bundestag removed the relevant advertising ban in the summer of 2022.

Excesses such as in the USA with terrorist attacks against clinics or practices that specialize in abortions do not exist in the Federal Republic; But riots and vigils do: abortion remains a reliable topic of excitement.

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