By Hilary Bowman-Smart, Christin Hempeler.
The long-standing political and social debate around abortion has experienced a resurgence in many countries. Over the 20th century, significant progress has been made on reproductive rights, including access to abortion services. However, recent years have seen much of that progress falter or slide backwards. We saw the fall of Roe v Wade in the United States in 2022, and the continuing rise of the anti-abortion far right in Europe.
Some countries in Europe have heavily restricted or effectively banned abortion, such as Poland and Hungary. However, in other European countries, this political shift has also prompted legislative changes to protect or expand access to abortion and reproductive care. Last year in 2024, France enshrined the right to abortion in its constitution.
In Germany, there has also been increased public and political attention to abortion legislation. While abortion services are provided in Germany, it is regulated under the Criminal Code. For the first 12 weeks after conception (14 weeks gestation), abortion is still unlawful, but those seeking abortion will not be punished. After this period, abortion may be provided only under certain circumstances. The most prominent of these is the medical indication – to avert “grave impairment to the pregnant woman’s physical or mental health” – which is typically applied in cases of diagnosis of a fetal condition.
There are a range of additional restrictions and hurdles around access to abortion, including requirements for mandatory counselling and a 3-day waiting period prior to abortion provision. Some of these restrictions have been lifted – until 2022, it was forbidden to advertise abortion services, which led to practical difficulties in finding abortion providers.
The repeal of restrictions like these has led to hopes that abortion legislation might undergo more significant reform in Germany, to decriminalise the procedure and improve access. In 2023, the then-ruling coalition of centre and centre-left parties led by Olaf Scholz appointed an expert commission to review a range of issues relating to reproduction. The scope of the final report released in April of 2024 included abortion, altruistic surrogacy, and egg donation. The report recommended the decriminalisation of abortion in the early stages of pregnancy, and that mandatory counselling and waiting period requirements are not necessary. This introduced hopes of legislative change on the horizon.
These hopes are now significantly dampened. In November of 2024 the Olaf Scholz coalition, which had commissioned the report, collapsed. In February, a cross-party proposal for abortion law reform failed to advance. A new federal election was held in February of this year (2025), leading to victory for the centre-right Christian Democratic Union led by Friedrich Merz. A social conservative, Merz has a long history of voting against increasing access to abortion. It is unlikely that abortion reform will be on this government’s agenda.
More worrying, however, is the meteoric rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), who are explicitly anti-abortion. The AfD is dominating in the former East Germany, with election maps showing an astonishingly almost-exact overlay with maps of the divided Cold War era Germany – an outcome arising from various complex dynamics. This has led to a situation where an explicitly anti-abortion party is now dominating in a region that historically had a much more liberal approach to abortion than West Germany, potentially threatening the now comparatively better access to abortion in these areas.
It is critical to recognise the impact of German history on today’s social and political climate. The inviolability of human dignity is enshrined in the German Constitution largely in response to the atrocities of the Third Reich and the Nazi regime. The history of Nazi eugenics has also shaped abortion law – for example, in 1995, the “embryopathic indication” for abortion was removed on the basis that it was a form of discrimination against people with disabilities.
Decisions by the German Constitutional Court in 1975 (West Germany) and 1993 (post-reunification) have interpreted the right to human dignity as extending to protection of the embryo or fetus, and that the state has a duty to protect fetal life. This has led to some uneasy and awkward legal compromises in progress on reproductive rights, such as the mandatory counselling requirement.
Beyond the law, there are practical issues in abortion access. The number of clinics providing abortions is low and access varies significantly in different regions. There are considerable rates of conscientious objection – and the situation is only getting worse, with fewer medical students being trained in the procedure to replace those who retire.
The 2024 Commission report represents promising steps. The recommendations to decriminalise abortion in earlier gestations is a welcome one. However, in our paper, we also highlight concerns about potential reforms making it more challenging to access abortion at later gestations by more tightly defining the medical indication. We hope that in the future, abortion law reform will come back onto the government’s political agenda – the majority of the German population support the decriminalisation of abortion. In the meantime, other things can be done to improve access. Legislative change alone is insufficient – more doctors need to be trained in these procedures, better data should be collected, and the stigma around abortion addressed.
Authors: Christin Hempeler, Hilary Bowman-Smart, Tamar Nov-Klaimann, Ruth Horn
Affiliations: Ruhr University Bochum, University of South Australia, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, University of Augsbug, University of Oxford
Competing interests: none