Emma Teworte
Research Topic
Illegal abortions in Germany, 1930s-1950s
My research examines police investigations and court trials concerning illegal abortions in Germany between the early 1930s and mid-1950s. On one level, I study how policies criminalising abortion were implemented in practice and which assumptions drove the authorities when interrogating, charging and sentencing those involved in abortions.
However, it is the predominantly working-class women and men caught in the police’s net that take centre-stage in my work. Expanding beyond frames of victimhood that have dominated discussions of illegal abortion during the period, I trace the trajectory of reproductive decision-making and the relationships and emotions involved in procuring or performing an abortion. I read documents originally constructed to criminalise women and men as sources for re-claiming their perceptions of women’s bodies and their gendered social obligations. I also foreground the role and subjectivity of those who we would today call abortion providers.
Overall, I see my research as centring around both how abortion provides a lens onto the space where class, gender and sexual norms were negotiated within the racialised Volksgemeinschaft (and its post-1945 incarnation) and between citizens and the state.
In conversation with my work, I also maintain an interest in queer history and the politics of memory.
I co-convene the modern European history graduate workshop in which DPhil students can present and discuss their work in an informal setting.
My research is funded by the OOC-AHRC doctoral training partnership, the Peter Storey scholarship at Balliol College and the Clarendon Fund.
Publications
- 'It Would be Better to Get Rid of It': Abortion and the Nazi Past in Weinheim and Garmisch, c.1951'. German History 43, no. 1 (March 2025), open access.
- I also try to work with memorials to commemorate abortion providers killed under National Socialism - you can find one such short biography here.
Supervisor: Professor Nick Stargardt
