We have an abortion!

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

We have an abortion! was the headline of Stern magazine on June 6, 1971. It was an action in which 374 prominent and non-prominent women - even if this was partly not the case - publicly announced that they had terminated their pregnancy and thus violated the law .

The action was initiated by the feminist and later founder of the magazine Emma , Alice Schwarzer , in order to fight against paragraph 218 of the penal code concerning abortion and is considered a milestone in the new women's movement in Germany .

Among the participants, 28 of whom could be seen on the cover picture, were the journalist Carola Stern and the actresses Senta Berger , Veruschka von Lehndorff , Ursula Noack , Romy Schneider , Sabine Sinjen , Vera Chekhova , Lis Verhoeven and Hanne Wieder . The campaign caused a sensation in Germany because it was the first time it publicly addressed the taboo subject of abortion and encouraged the establishment of several feminist groups that campaigned against paragraph 218.

The Stern article was followed by the premiere of the movie Paragraph 218 - We have an abortion, Mr. Public Prosecutor in Berlin , on September 2, 1971 .

history

The model for the campaign was a similar action ( Le manifeste des 343 ), in which 343 French women publicly declared on April 5, 1971 in the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur : Je me suis fait avorter (“I had an abortion .”). These included Simone de Beauvoir , the actresses Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau , the writers Marguerite Duras and Françoise Sagan, and the directors Ariane Mnouchkine and Agnès Varda .

The French campaign was initiated by Jean Moreau, an editor of the Nouvel Observateur . A few weeks later he got in touch with Alice Schwarzer and asked for advice, since he had noticed that a German magazine wanted to take up the action. However, he feared that it would be an advertising campaign. Schwarzer then contacted her well-known Stern editor Winfried Maaß and agreed with him to initiate a corresponding action, provided that Schwarzer was able to mobilize between 300 and 400 women to commit to an abortion.

Within the following month, Schwarzer managed to win 374 women for the campaign. To this end, she first asked the Frankfurt Action Council for the liberation of women , but was rejected because the women's group found the action too “petty-bourgeois” and “reformist”. By contrast, around half of the women participating in the campaign were among the members of the Socialist Women's Association in West Berlin. The other participants found each other through word of mouth .

Years after the campaign was published in Stern , some of the women involved admitted that in truth they personally had not performed an abortion at all - including Alice Schwarzer herself: “But that didn't matter. We would have done it if we had been unintentionally pregnant. "

On the fortieth anniversary, Arte showed the film We have aborted - The end of silence , which was made in production with the NDR .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Grossbölting: The lost heaven: Faith in Germany since 1945. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-525-30040-4 , p. 131 f.
  2. ↑ Alice Schwarzer: "I have no regrets" - 30 years ago the feminist initiated the campaign "We have an abortion". ( Memento of the original from September 10, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. FrauenMediaTurm @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.frauenmediaturm.de
  3. ↑ Le manifeste des 343.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Le Nouvel Observateur , No. 334 of April 5, 1971.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.jacquesmagnin.fr  
  4. ↑ "We Drifted" - Story of a Bluff. In: Die Welt , January 20, 2008.
  5. ↑ An unheard of self-confession. In: Die Zeit from April 23, 2009
  6. ↑ Jutta Kramm: Two lives. berliner-zeitung.de, June 6, 2001.
  7. ↑ Steffen Kraft: Women and Men: Latest investigations in the crisis area. I did not have an abortion. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 31, 2005.
  8. ↑ Christiane Eikmann, Paul Barz: Arte documentary goes public commitment to abortion.