Reunited Germany Divided Over Abortion Rights Issue

Germans have been struggling for a decade to unify the pro-choice policies of the former East Germany with the restrictive abortion traditions of the west, but the latest changes to laws and practice have only highlighted the seemingly unbridgeable divide.

Proponents of a woman’s right to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term or abort a first-trimester fetus have hailed the recent approval of the controversial RU-486 abortion pill by the Federal Institute of Pharmaceuticals and Medications.

But the ruling earlier this month by the German equivalent of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration came only a week after the German Catholic Bishops Conference took action aimed at preventing abortions for thousands of women who seek guidance from the church each year.

Abortion is illegal in reunified Germany, but a woman can terminate an unwanted pregnancy without punishment if she obtains a certificate from one of the country’s nearly 1,700 state-funded family-planning centers attesting that she has been counseled about other options.

The Roman Catholic Church operates 270 of those counseling centers--including the majority in the predominantly Catholic states of Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg--and as a result, Catholic counselors have been issuing de facto permission slips for abortion.

Although abortion laws were toughened four years ago, they have failed to reduce the number of terminations. On the contrary, in precisely those western states where the Catholic Church is strongest, the frequency of abortions has been rising, while the number of terminated pregnancies has dropped in the five eastern states and Berlin, where abortion was free and available on demand in the communist era.

Appalled by the statistics, Pope John Paul II last month told the bishops conference to review the church’s role in counseling pregnant women.

At a meeting in the Bavarian city of Wuerzburg, the bishops decided to continue counseling pregnant women--a service for which they are compensated from government coffers--but to note on each certificate issued that it “cannot be used for carrying out unpenalized abortions.”

Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin observed shortly after the bishops’ decision that such a notation would have no legal weight because federal law requires only that a certificate be presented that confirms the counseling was done at least three days before the abortion.

Even the head of the bishops’ conference, Bishop Karl Lehmann, concedes that the addendum is unlikely to pose any real obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion.

And Guenther Kindermann, president of the German Society of Gynecology and Obstetrics, said he is confident that the revised certificates issued by Catholic counselors will continue to be considered valid by the medical community.

“But I would advise any doctor who performs abortions to wait until state authorities have made clear whether the certificates still meet the legal requirements,” he added with a word of caution for his colleagues.

Nonetheless, Kindermann said a wait-and-see policy should pose no serious barrier to women wanting abortions because they can still obtain an unfettered certificate from a secular counseling agency.

Family-planning counselors and physicians predict that the church action is more likely to deter Catholic women from seeking advice from their parish counselors than to decrease the incidence of abortion.

“The main consequence of this stipulation on the certificate will be to place a very heavy emotional burden on women who are already in difficult straits,” said Hanna Havemann, a physician and director of the Balance Center for Family Planning and Sexuality, an East Berlin clinic that provides both counseling and abortions.

While doctors and judicial officials are certain there will be no risk of malpractice accusations for physicians who disregard the church’s notation, some see a greater threat of legal consequences with use of the RU-486 pill.

The pill, developed more than a decade ago by French doctors, allows a woman to avoid a surgical procedure and its considerably higher cost, but its administration must be accompanied by a labor-inducing drug that is currently unavailable except for treatment covered by Germany’s network of health care insurers. Because abortions remain technically illegal even with counseling certificates, they are not covered by insurance and cannot be carried out in state-run hospitals.

Despite the approval of the RU-486 pill, German pharmaceutical companies producing the labor-inducing drugs have signaled reluctance to sell them to abortion clinics for fear of boycotts of their other products threatened by anti-abortion groups. That means an abortion provider would have to import the drugs from outside Germany or use connections with state-run hospitals covered by the insurance system to obtain them, which could open up legal pitfalls.

Lehmann, head of the bishops conference, has denounced the federal drug agency’s decision to legalize the prescription of RU-486.

“With this, the danger increases that the conscious murder of unborn life will become a customary means of birth control,” he said, warning that physical risks and spiritual wounds are being underestimated by the medical profession.

While Germans remain as deeply divided as Americans on the contentious abortion issue, the abortion rights and anti-abortion factions seldom clash with the same intensity that afflicts U.S. communities with anger, violence and litigation.