Politics of Reproduction in a Divided Europe: Abortion, Protest Movements and State Interventions after the Second World War

After the Second World War, European states developed new policies toward human reproduction. The deep transformations which occurred in the debates over abortion and over concepts like 'motherhood' and 'reproduction' on both sides of the Berlin wall exemplify the relation of the 'politics of reproduction' to the political systems of postwar Europe. This article presents four case studies of national reproductive policies in Western Europe (Federal Republic of Germany and France) and Eastern Europe (German Democratic Republic and Romania), comparing different states' involvements in abortion legislation in order to analyze the debates, protests and silences which divided people and policies along national and bloc lines in Europe after 1945