Abortion Protest Germany -Civil Disobedience

374 women, including celebrities publicly admitted (i.e. "pleaded guilty") to having had abortions and thus violating Paragraph 218 of the German penal code. (in the year 1971)

The leftist strategy: Too many people, simultaneously, admit to a crime, so that government does not dare to prosecute them all.

If you are pro-life, opposed to abortion, please bear with me and just take this as a case study of leftist civil obedience to reach a political goal.

We suggest this strategy in Truth Revolt: Sept. 11: Defy gag orders, tell truth

If too many people, in a concerted action, break the racism taboo, admit to racist truths, we can reach a breakthrough.

If thousands of people violate the racism taboo and its gag orders, if police tell the truth about Black or Muslim crime, and about gag orders, and teachers about Black and Muslim school bullying, the population can learn the truth.

Scientific Honesty & integrity compromised by PC Antiracist dogma

Break the Code of Silence

"We Had Abortions" – Protest against Paragraph 218 (1971)
Below is the cover of the June 6, 1971, issue of Stern, a West German magazine based in Hamburg. The issue appeared on newsstands amidst nation-wide protests against the highly controversial Paragraph 218 of the Basic Law, which, almost without exception, defined abortion as a criminal act. Feminist Alice Schwarzer and the "Frauenaktion 70" ["Women's Action 70"], a group of female activists who championed abortion rights, spearheaded the German initiative to bring the issue to the forefront of public and political debate. A total of 374 women – including celebrities such as actress Romy Schneider – responded to their appeal and publicly admitted (i.e. "pleaded guilty") to having abortions and thus breaking the law.
Paragraph 218 was first introduced into German criminal law under Bismarck in 1871 and remained virtually unaltered until the 1970s. Up to then, abortion was only legally possible for medical reasons. Although the women of "Frauenaktion 70" did not achieve their goal of abolishing the "Abortion Article," their protest was nonetheless an important trigger for future legal reforms: Legislation enacted in the mid-1970s finally allowed pregnant women to assert their right to an abortion on social, ethical, and medical grounds.
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Source: "Wir haben abgetrieben," Stern, June 6, 1971.

Abortion and Women's Solidarity (1971)

Inspired by a campaign in France, 374 women signed an appeal to abolish Paragraph 218, publicly admitting that they themselves had had abortions (legal proceedings were instituted against the signers but later dropped). The appeal generated great public attention when it first appeared in Stern on June 6, 1971.

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Appeal: I Had an Abortion

Every year about one million women in the Federal Republic have abortions. Hundreds die; tens of thousands are left sick and sterile because these operations are performed by laypeople. When performed by medical specialists, pregnancy termination is a routine procedure.

Women with financial means can have safe abortions in Germany and abroad. Women without financial means are forced by Paragraph 218 [of the Basic Law] onto the kitchen tables of quack doctors. It labels them criminals and threatens prison sentences of up to five years.

And still, millions of women have abortions – under humiliating and life-threatening circumstances.

I am one of them. – I had an abortion.

I am opposed to Paragraph 218 and in favor of wanted children.

We women do not want alms from the legislators, nor do we want reform in installments!

We demand the unqualified repeal of Paragraph 218.

We demand comprehensive sex education for everyone and free access to contraceptives!

We demand the right to pregnancy termination that is covered by health insurance!

Source: “Appell: Ich habe abgetrieben” [“Appeal: I Had an Abortion”] (1971), Stern, June 6, 1971; reprinted in Alice Schwarzer, So fing es an! Die neue Frauenbewegung [So it Started! The New Women’s Movement]. Munich, 1981, p. 124.

Source Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wir haben abgetrieben! ("We've had abortions!") was the headline on the cover of the West German magazine Stern on 6 June 1971.^[1] 374 women, some but not all of whom had a high public profile, publicly asserted that they had had pregnancies terminated, which at that time was illegal.^[2]

The action was triggered by the controversialist-feminist (and founder, some years later, of the feminist magazine EMMA) Alice Schwarzer:^[3] it targeted Paragraph 218 of the country's penal code. It is viewed by many as a milestone in the feminist revival of the 1970s.^[2][3]

In addition to the eye-catching headline, the magazine cover incorporated pictures of 28 of the better known participants. These included the journalist Carola Stern and the actresses Senta Berger, Veruschka von Lehndorff, Ursula Noack (de), Romy Schneider, Sabine Sinjen, Vera Tschechowa, Lis Verhoeven and Hanne Wieder. The event caused a particular sensation in West Germany, because it broke a widely respected taboo on public discussion of abortion; and it was followed by the founding of several feminist groups, and it provided a focus for opposition to Paragraph 218 of the penal code until 1992 when the legal position changed following reunification. [...]

History

Background

The example for the campaign came from a similar action two months earlier, "The manifesto of 343 sluts" ("Le manifeste des 343 salopes"),^[4] which had involved 343 French women signing up to an equivalent declaration in the Paris-based Nouvel Observateur of 5 April 1971. French intellectuals and media stars who had supported the "manifesto" included Simone de Beauvoir, Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau,^[5] Marguerite Duras, Françoise Sagan, Ariane Mnouchkine and Agnès Varda.

The initiator of the campaign in France was an editor at the Nouvel Observateur called Jean Moreau. A few weeks later he contacted Alice Schwarzer because he was concerned by rumours that a German news magazine was about to pick up on the French campaign and that Nouvel Observateur's actions in France might become part of a massive uncontrollable media campaign in West Germany. Schwarzer already knew the Stern editor Winfried Maaß, and she came to an agreement with him to initiate the action in Stern as long as she could mobilise between 300 and 400 women to sign up to a declaration including an "abortion confession".

During the next few months Schwarzer managed to win over 374 women. Her initial approach was to the Frankfurt based "Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frau" ("Council for Women's Liberation"): they turned her down, rejecting the action proposed as excessively middle class (literally „kleinbürgerlich“ und „reformistisch“). She had a better result with the Berlin based "Socialist Women's Assication" (""Sozialistische Frauenbund") which in the end produced more than half of the 374 participants. The rest were recruited through word of mouth.^[6]

Aftermath

The French campaign had its result in 1975 when the Health and Families Minister Simone Veil succeeded, in the face of sustained resistance from various quarters, in pushing through a comprehensive abortion reform law.^[6] The legal position remains more nuanced in Germany where a qualified liberalisation measure followed in 1976, but it was only in 1992 that the need to harmonize the legal position inherited from the previously separate Western and Eastern Germanys led to further relaxation of the relevant statutory restrictions.

Some years after it appeared in Stern, it emerged that not all of the 374 women signing up to the "abortion confession" had actually undergone abortions themselves.^[7] Alice Schwarzer herself was one of those who had falsely signed up to the confession, but she robustly rejected press suggestions that the entire campaign had been based on a bluff:^[8]

"That completely misses the point. Each of us would have done it if we had had an unwanted pregnancy. That 'confession' was not a moral action but a political one."^[8][9]

Forty years on, he Franco-German television channel Arte screened a film entitled "Wir haben abgetrieben – Das Ende des Schweigens" ("We've had abortions - an end to the silence"), produced in collaboration with Norddeutscher Rundfunk. The film offered a retrospective review of the campaign and of subsequent developments. ^[10][Source Wikipedia]