Nazi Germany’s abortion ban

Nazi Germany’s abortion ban made abortion illegal and, as the book describes it, exposed women who underwent or even attempted one to the death penalty. Its significance lies in the stark contrast the narrative draws between this punishment and the regime’s organized killing of infants classified as defective: protection of life was applied selectively, through coercive control over women and state judgments about which children were worth raising.

The Ban and Its Penalty

The account states that abortion was illegal in Nazi Germany and that a woman who carried one out, or merely attempted one, faced the death penalty. It offers no statutory text, date, or individual prosecution, so the rule appears here as a broad account of the regime’s legal threat rather than a case history. Even in this concise description, the threatened punishment is severe: the state’s response extended beyond a completed abortion to an attempt.

The Contrast with Infant Killing

The ban is introduced alongside the Nazi program of killing infants regarded as unfit under the regime’s racial ambitions. Premature or paralyzed newborns, and infants suspected of intellectual disability, were taken to special wards known as Kinderfachabteilungen. There, the account says, small doses of phenobarbital were used to kill them. Pediatricians, nurses, and midwives were required to report designated births, receiving a small financial compensation for doing so; the resulting campaign killed about ten thousand babies within a few years.

Set beside that program, the abortion ban does not read as a general commitment to preserving every life. The regime could authorize the deaths of children it judged defective while threatening women with death for ending a pregnancy. The juxtaposition reveals a system that valued reproduction selectively, subordinating both women’s choices and infants’ survival to state-defined categories of worth.

Place in the Book’s History of Infanticide

The book places this contradiction within a longer history of societies assigning different meanings and penalties to the killing of newborns and the ending of pregnancies. Its account moves from earlier practices of selecting which children would be raised to the policies of the Nazi Germany period, then stresses the disparity between the regime’s lethal treatment of disabled infants and its prohibition of abortion. The ban therefore functions not merely as a criminal rule but as part of the book’s examination of how legal power governs reproduction—and how claims to protect life can coexist with organized violence.