Brosius-Gersdorf case: men, just hold the flap!

The German state paid five billion euros to maintenance advance last year. So as a replacement for fathers who would rather starve their children than to comply with their financial responsibility. In theory, you can reclaim the money from them. This usually doesn’t happen in practice. Too complicated, too lengthy.

What does that have to do with the case of the controversial SPD candidate for the Federal Constitutional Court, Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf? A lot. Because it shows how wrong the debate is.

In this, men in particular speak out loudly. They denounce the lawyer with a chair for public law at the University of Potsdam in particular for their position on the abortion.

The lawyer of a renowned law firm polemized on Twitter, in Germany it is now being discussed again whether human dignity can be weighed in grams. A reduction in the question of when human life begins and is therefore particularly worth protecting for a lawyer. Other men put Brosius-Gersdorf in the tradition of judges of National Socialism. The Bamberg Archbishop Herwig Gössl spoke in connection with the lawyer in a sermon of an “abyss of human context”. In the meantime, he says he has been misinterpreted.

What do all these men have in common? You will never face the question of whether you should give birth to a child. You will never feel how another being “takes over” her body and sometimes changed it forever. You will never have the existential experience of a birth that is associated with pain for many women that you have never experienced before and will never experience it again.

In many cases, the decision as to whether you are ready for a lifelong responsibility for a child is still responsible for women. Theoretically, men are also affected from the moment of birth. In practice, however, there are still a large number: in 2024, 85 percent of single parents were still women.

The decision to get a child is one of the most extensive life. A marriage can be ended by divorce, selling a home again, cancel the job.

In the demolition of pregnancy, two fundamental rights face one another: the right of unborn life on special protection and the right to self-determination of women, about her body and about her life. Brosius-Gersdorf has tried to illuminate this legally difficult relationship. You don’t have to share your point of view (per liberalization of the right to abortion) as well as that of the opposite side (tightening the applicable law).

But to pretend that the question was easy to answer is a lie. If one were to follow the argument that unborn life should be protected at all costs, there should be no abortions in Germany anymore. With the exception of the medical indication, i.e. when pregnancy puts the life of women in danger. For a reason, such an attitude is no longer consistent in our society. Because they despise the right of life that has already been born, in this case, that of women.

What drives men to go into the debate with such polemics? Is it an attempt to make yourself important? Or the secret longing for those times when all women’s rights derived from the guidelines of a patriarchal society?

Either way, as so often: if you have no idea (in this case of pregnancy and birth), you should just hold the flap!

But, moment: There are many things that men could ask loudly if they were really concerned with life protection. For example, that their gender comrades take responsibility for pregnancies who have to do with them and offer the expectant mother financial and emotional support – even if there is no relationship at the time of the generation and this is not sought.

If a real change in mentality and culture were carried out here, this would bring much more in the fight against abortions than any cheap and split polemics.