Abortion ban in Germany: How Paragraph 218 was discussed 50 years ago

“We had an abortion,” 374 women admitted to “Stern” in June 1971.

Almost three years later, 329 doctors went public in SPIEGEL: They had “performed the forbidden procedure or helped women do it.”

And they would “continue to do so,” they assured.

In order to “finally break the hypocrisy,” 14 of them announced an abortion in front of an audience.

It was an attempt to work with women's organizations to campaign for the abolition of paragraph 218, but at least for a time limit solution, i.e. abortion without penalty up to the end of the third month of pregnancy.

This was also stated in a bill from the social-liberal coalition.

The Union and parts of the Social Democrats, however, favored the indication solution: abortions should only be permitted in the early stages of pregnancy in certain emergency situations that had to be certified by medical experts.

Exactly which emergencies should justify an abortion was controversial.

Women's rights activists and those who signed the petition wanted to prevent this external determination of one's own body by experts.

All over the republic, people demonstrated against the indication model; in Hamburg, for example, they marched through the city center with their mouths taped shut.

The government proposal won a narrow majority in the Bundestag.

But the question was far from settled.

At the request of Union-led federal states, the Federal Constitutional Court initially stopped the deadline solution by means of an interim order - and finally in 1975.

The highest court ruled that the “fruit of the body” enjoys the same basic rights protection as a born human being.

SPIEGEL 11/1974: Uprising of the sisters

To the table of contents of issue 11/1974

Otherwise in this issue:

As in many dictatorships, in the People's Republic of China one could never be sure about the actual intention of the leadership.

In 1974, some signs pointed to a return of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution", one of the many mistakes of the "great helmsman" Mao Zedong.

In doing so, he brought China to the brink of ruin in the 1960s.

“The demons come every seven years,” said Mao, referring to cadres who seemed to rule the country almost in the style of the imperial mandarins.

As a result, it was time to replace the officials - apart from Mao himself, of course.

At that time, Mao let the young Red Guards off the leash, who essentially disempowered the entire leadership class.

They humiliated tens of thousands of managers and, with Mao's blessing, forced them to work on the land.

Now again “the flames of revolutionary mass criticism were rising to the sky.”

People's militias once again marched noisily through Canton with iron bars, and walkers and lovers were scared away on the Pearl River: “Go to sleep!

That's not serving the people! Tens of thousands of people spent the evenings at large rallies again and listened to Mao's teachings.

The “class enemies,” the radio announced in the style of the Red Guards, would soon be “a pile of dog shit,” and the “Volkszeitung” named 1974 the “year of turmoil.”

“Is a new cultural revolution devouring the order that Premier Zhou Enlai has just regained?” SPIEGEL asked.

For no apparent reason, a debate had broken out about the meaning of the ancient philosopher Confucius, whose teachings of loyalty to family and state had helped the Chinese communists to live wonderfully up to that point.

Now groups everywhere expressed their deep disgust for the founder of Confucianism.

Everyone knew that there was actually a power struggle between “left-wing” revolutionaries and “right-wing” restoration supporters in the party.

He probably didn't know exactly which faction Mao favored.

In the "Confucius Campaign" "everyone could be the victim, everyone could be the perpetrator and every faction could have its own 'Confucius'," SPIEGEL puzzled.

It became increasingly clear that the seriously ill Mao had to make a decision not only on the Confucius question, but above all with regard to his successor.

A new constitution was also needed because Lin Biao was still established as Mao's successor.

However, he had fallen into disgrace and died under mysterious circumstances while allegedly fleeing to the Soviet Union.

China's mass media tried hard to turn Mao's "closest comrade in arms" into a "bourgeois careerist, duplicitous" and "traitor."

The former demon fighter mutated into a demon.

DER SPIEGEL: Cover photo of issue 11/1974

The crown prince now seemed to be the pragmatist Zhou Enlai, who had brought back the old cadres like Deng Xiaoping, got the economy going again and ensured order on China's streets.

Almost as an afterthought, the country cautiously opened up to the West under Zhou.

But the “leftists” also rose to power, including Mao’s wife Jiang Qing and the “whiz-kid” Wang Hongwen, both of whom were arrested after Mao’s death as members of the notorious “Gang of Four.”

They were against the rehabilitation of the exiled officials, against the use of wage bonuses, and against any private sector in general.

They abhorred the “superstitious adulation of everything foreign.”

Instead of Mozart, “songs in praise of Mao and the party” should be played again.

Both lines agreed on creating a dictatorship in which the then 700 million Chinese people from kindergarten to university were systematically indoctrinated into devout followers of the Communist Party and Mao.

The regime called it “democratic centralism” in the usual “doublespeak,” as SPIEGEL Asia correspondent Fritjof Meyer learned on his first trip to China since the Cultural Revolution.

In the following four-part series, Meyer described a "well-ordered country" - without hunger, but also without "any cultural or political liberality and intellectual independence of the individual."

SPIEGEL 11/1974: "In me is the spirit of tiger and monkey"

“Distributing brochures, delivering mail, collecting laundry – will people soon be superfluous for such services?” SPIEGEL asked as early as 1974. The first electronic servants were in hospitals and office buildings in the USA.

At Detroit's Harper Webber Hospital, 70 robots handed out food and collected dirty laundry just as uncomplainingly.

Thanks to their “sophisticated” programming, they were even able to “ride the elevator independently,” the editors were amazed.

At the Sears Tower in Chicago, automated carts served as mail carriers.

Radio signals ensured that the “225 kilo postal robot” did not stray.

Robots that handed out brochures at a trade fair were even trained to be polite: they asked visitors for their “pardon” “using a recorded voice.”

SPIEGEL 11/1974: Nimble assistants