Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany [Paperback]

Abortion in the Weimar Republic is a compelling subject since it provoked public debates and campaigns of an intensity rarely matched elsewhere. It proved so explosive because populationist, ecclesiastical and political concerns were heightened by cultural anxieties of a modernity in crisis. Based on an exceptionally rich source material (e.g., criminal court cases, doctors case books, personal diaries, feature films, plays and literary works), this study explores different attitudes and experiences of those women who sought to terminate an unwanted pregnancy and those who helped or hindered them. It analyzes the dichotomy between medical theory and practice, and questions common assumptions, i.e. that abortion was a necessary evil, which needed strict regulation and medical control; or that all back-street abortions were dangerous and bad. Above all, the book reveals womens own voices, frequently contradictory and ambiguous: having internalized medical ideas they often also adhered to older notions of reproduction which opposed scientific approaches.

[The authors] careful analysis of multiple discourses, makes clear how innovative the debate over abortion in Weimar Germany was. The popular cultural evidence and the medical discourse and the criminal law cases tell us somewhat different things about how abortion was understood at this historical moment; Usborne's analysis and juxtaposition of these various meanings is masterful and persuasive.? ??H-German

&The author offers a shift of paradigm in the history of abortion in Weimar Germany by writing a history of everyday life from the point of view of lower-class women as well as revealing the professional interests of physicians. Even committed sex reformers like the Munich gynaecologist Adams Lehmann appear ambivalent since she sterilised her abortion patients on eugenic grounds without consent.? ??Historische Zeitschrift