Personal Bio
Jane Freeland is a Lecturer in History and Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. Her work focuses on the history of feminism, gender, and sexuality in post-1945 Germany and her monograph, Feminist Transformations and Domestic Violence Activism in Divided Berlin, 1968-2002 (OUP, 2022), explores how feminists challenged and sought to address violence against women, and how in the process feminist activism itself was transformed. She has also published articles in Geschichte und Gesellschaft (2023), German History (2023 and 2020) and the Journal of Women’s History (2017).
Project Description
“We’re Travelling to Holland”: Abortion Travel, Transnational Mobility and the Campaign for Reproductive Rights
This project examines reproductive rights in the Federal Republic of Germany following the liberalization of abortion law in the mid-1970s. Specifically, it studies abortion travel from West Germany to the Netherlands. Following a years-long campaign by feminists and women’s rights supporters in West Germany, Paragraph 218 (the Criminal Code provision governing abortion) was decriminalized in 1974. But, almost immediately, the constitutionality of decriminalization was challenged and, in 1975, the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe struck it down based on the constitutional guarantee of the sanctity of life. Abortion was thus recriminalized and a new law permitting abortion only under certain conditions and in certain circumstances was introduced in 1976.
Although this reform still represented a significant liberalization of abortion, it was considered a major defeat for feminists who wanted to see abortion fully decriminalized. In response, feminists organized group bus trips to the Netherlands as both a protest and solution to the inadequacies of the new reform. While it was common for West German women to travel to the Netherlands to obtain a termination prior to the 1976 reform, this practice was politicized by feminists after as an alternative to accessing abortion services in West Germany.
Examining abortion travel and feminist reproductive rights activism after 1976, this project thus explores what happens after abortion liberalization and asks how women’s rights are implemented and secured after legal change. But this is not only a history of reproductive rights and the evolution of feminist activism. It is also an examination of how women’s rights are negotiated and constituted in travel across borders and through transnational mobility. By travelling to the Netherlands, women could circumvent barriers to abortion in Germany, but they also faced significant risks. How then did different national estimations of reproductive rights and gender norms clash at the border crossing, and what does that tell us about the gendered limits of the freedom of movement within the European Union/European Community?