The controversial paragraph 219a of the Penal Code, approved in 1933 shortly after Adolf Hitler arrogate full powers, prohibited “advertising” for the voluntary termination of pregnancy.
Physicians who detailed the abortion methods they employed risked “up to two years in prison or a fine.”
The government coalition parties, the social democrats (SPD), the Green and the Liberals (FDP), voted in favor of lifting this ban, while the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the far right (AfD) voted against.
The repeal of paragraph 219a was a compromise of the coalition contract signed in November by the government parties.
The law approved on Friday will also allow the annulment of convictions or fines imposed in recent years doctors who provided information on their website about abortion.
In June 2019, two Berlin gynecologists, Bettina Gaber and Verena Weyer, were fined €2,000 each for the same reason.
In this context, doctors had preferred to remove all information on the subject from their website and refused to appear on the lists provided by family plans.
Faced with the outrage caused by the legal difficulties of the doctors, the government of the former chancellor Angela Merkel had decided, at the beginning of 2019, to slightly relax this legislation allowing gynecologists and hospitals to warn on their website that they perform abortion.
Instead, they were always forbidden to detail the methods they used.
Abortion remains a rocky road in Germany, despite being at the forefront of the fight for women’s rights in the 1970s.
A woman who wishes to have an abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy must participate in a mandatory consultation at an authorized center. The objective of this interview is “to encourage the woman to continue her pregnancy,” according to the legislator.
With few exceptions (endangering the life of the mother, rape…), abortion, whose cost can reach several hundred euros, is not reimbursed by health insurance funds.
About 100,000 abortions are performed in Germany each year, but the trend has been downward in recent years.
Source: Ambito
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