As far as women’s rights related to abortions are concerned, a lot has happened, such as the abolition of the advertising ban. Federal Family Minister Paus considers further steps worth considering – including one that would bring her into conflict with her coalition partners.
Federal Family Minister Lisa Paus wants to make abortions part of medical training. “The various medical methods of abortions should be part of the training for doctors, for example,” said the Green politician to the Berlin “Tagesspiegel”. She is in discussion with Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach.
Paus emphasized that further steps would have to follow the abolition of the advertising ban for abortions: “We must not stop there.” The Greens politician was also fundamentally open to tackling paragraph 218 on abortion: abortions do not belong in the penal code, she said. However, she does not want to anticipate a commission of experts planned by the traffic light coalition on this subject.
The Bundestag decided in June to abolish the advertising ban for abortions. According to Section 219a, “advertising for the termination of pregnancy” was previously prohibited. As a result, practices and clinics were forbidden to provide detailed information about different methods of abortion.
Section 218 of the Criminal Code prohibits abortions and only exempts them from punishment under certain conditions. In the coalition agreement, the traffic light parties had agreed to set up a commission to examine various issues relating to reproduction – “regulations for abortion outside of the penal code” should also be examined.
In the traffic light coalition, there are signs of a conflict about the future of abortion law with regard to paragraph 2018. “Maybe individual parliamentarians from other parties may have different views, we stand crystal clear by the regulation stipulated by Section 218 of the Criminal Code,” said Katrin Helling-Plahr, a FDP legal politician, in a recent guest article for an online magazine of the “Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung”. With the Free Democrats there will be “no departure from the life protection concept of the Federal Constitutional Court”.
