GERMANY
New threat to abortion rights WHILST recent months have seen setbacks for hard line anti-abortionists in Great Britain (see IV 185) and Belgium (see IV 188), the right in West Germany is intent on rolling back the already limited access to abortion which women in the Federal Republic have. The right wing offensive has an added significance because of the impending unification of the West with East Germany, where women have already begun to mobilize provisions of this paragraph of their content -some tribunals have had the effrontery to seek to establish after the event if a situation of distress really existed. In reality it is a policy of massive intimidation of women and doctors to dissuade them from making use of their rights.
During these two trials, the authorities have seized files containing the names abortion legislation introduced old neo-Stalinist regime. ANGELA KLEIN S TREIBL, the successor to
Franz Josef Strauss as head of the Bavarian government, has made the cessation of funding for abortions and the suppression of the legal possibility of abortion in cases of social distress a personal goal. So much so that he accuses the government of a lack of political will in pursuing one of the projects most dear to the right before their return to power.
The legislative measures proposed by CDU deputies to increase the administrative difficulties involved in having an abortion (for example through the separation of the place and time of interview and prescription) have met with the resistance of the FDP (Free Democrats, a liberal party in coalition with the CDU). At the end of 1989, the coalition government ruled out their consideration before the end of the current legislature.
Yet the content of these measures was still too soft in the eyes of the self-styled "protectors of life" of the CDU/CSU. Regions governed by these parties have prosecuted abortion-related trials at Memmingen in Bavaria, and now Koblenz in Rhineland Palatinate.
Roundabout attack on legal provisions
In retrospect, it is obvious that the essential objective of these trials was not to establish whether the law had been broken (for example the carrying out of an abortion outside the framework envis14 aged by paragraph 218 of the current legislation), but rather to empty certain International Viewpoint #189 • July 16, 1990 by the of 10,000 patients; they have gathered together hundreds of testimonies of women who have had abortions. They seek to use statistics to prove what is already officially affirmed in Bavaria; "abortion is no longer limited to certain categories. When 87% are for reasons of distress it is clear that very few abortions take place because of material difficulties". These are the words of Udo Steiner, a professor of public and administrative law at the university of Regensburg, charged by the Bavarian goverment with lodging a complaint to the supreme constitutional tribunal that the legal framework is not being respected.
When it is known that 200-300,000 women have abortions in West Germany each year, that the number of unemployed has for some years exceeded two million, that the number of women who live alone with their children has grown constantly and that the FRG [Federal Republic of Germany] has, with 13.8% of abortions effected legally, one of the lowest rates in western Europe (Ireland and southern Europe aside, only Holland has a lower rate with 9.7%), the statement that there will no longer be situa tions of distress in the FRG appears incredible.
Long-term anti-abortion strategy
The Bavarian government's complaint is only a new logical stage of a systematic long term policy which seeks the rolling back of even the timid reform of 1974, and the complete suppression of abortion for social reasons. Beyond even this, it is abortion for medical reasons which is at stake.
The constitutional tribunal reflects the positions of the federal government, the federal parliament and the regional parliaments, political bodies essentially composed of men who are being permitted once again to decide on the fate of women's bodies.
The regional government of Bavaria, by exercising this new political pressure on the federal government, hopes to get its legislation passed before the end of the year, lest the results of the next legislative elections should prove unfavourable to it. The detour via the constitutional tribunal, while delaying the process, will ultimately make it easier to deal with those political bodies which might prove obstructive to new attacks on abortion rights (a regional SPD government for example) as in 1975, when the constitutional tribunal declared unconstitutional the introduction of a time limit during which it would have been possible to have a legal abortion, which had been decided by the government with the approval of a majority of political opinion. Chameleons of East German politics
The recourse to the constitutional tribunal could have another justification for the anti-abortion lobby. A time limit for legally authorized abortion has existed in the GDR [German Democratic Republic] since 1972. Although chameleons like the DSU president, the pastor Ebeling, and the East German CDU wish to roll the tide of history backwards on this point, the women of the East are more and more resolved to defend their social conquests.
In the context of annexation, involving the imposition on the GDR of the whole of the legal apparatus of the FRG, a decision of the tribunal on this question would deprive women of the possibility of establishing by their mobilizations a relationship of forces which could lead to the opposite result - the adoption by the FRG of the more progressive social and legislative measures prevailing in the GDR.
In the FRG a large unitary front has been formed which, on June 16, organized a demonstration for the suppression of clause 218 of the penal code. It is both possible and desirable to organize common actions of women from the FRG and the GDR.
This demonstration found a large echo in the ranks of the trade unions and of the social democracy. The demand for the suppression of paragraphs 218 and 219 has been made central through the united action of the social democratic women (ASF, the organization of women in the SPD) and IG Metall. It won support at the last congress of the SPD in Berlin, in which it was said that "penal proceedings are not an appropriate measure to resolve conflicts linked to pregnancy. That is why we demand that the indispensable legal measures are not linked to repressive measures"
in defence of the more progressive
This formulation avoids calling for the pure and simple suppression of 218, which is an old demand of the autonomous women's movement. Its justification is a little tenuous — it is argued that the suppression of the clause would not eliminate the risk of judicial proceedings, for it would still be possible to invoke the clause concerning bodily mutilations. But the women of the ASF do not demand the suppression of this clause. On the other hand the formulation "suppression of the penal code" leaves open the possibility of introducing new legislation on abortion in the civil code. This is precisely what the ASF wants. Abortion must be made legal-
The new Mc THE absorption of the GDR by the FRG, whatever its rhythms and the moment of its finalization, poses several delicate problems for German big business and the bourgeois establishment. One of these, which has until now, received less attention than the monetary, economic and social contradictions which will be accentuated, is the future line-up of political parties in a united Germany. ERNEST MANDEL