The ‘Gesetz über die Unterbrechung der Schwangerschaft’ [Termination of pregnancy act] was passed on 9 March 1972, legalizing abortion in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This progressive bill, upheld by many as a communist reform, was also read as a political move by the party to align with the rest of the Eastern bloc and precede its Western counterpart. This cluster of materials explores the ways in which women’s reproductive rights and issues more generally were moderated between women’s organizations, histories of migration, and party politics.

The Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands (Democratic Women’s Federation of Germany) (DFD) was established in 1947 as the outcome of various anti-fascist women factions that formed in the aftermath of the Second World War. Originally active in both West and East Germany, but later banned in the Federal Republic of Germany, the federation garnered up to 500,000 members by 1949. Several early documents of the DFD serve as departure points for this thematic resonance.

A key facet of the DFD was its alliance with international fronts for women’s struggles for justice and equality; they joined the Women's International Democratic Federation, considered by many to be the most influential women’s organization during the Cold War era. In an image presented here, Veronika Prempeh from the Ghana delegation speaks at the 7th Congress of the DFD which was held in East Berlin on 23 November 1960 and hosted representatives of international women’s movements. The focus of the congress was to discuss the ways in which women and mothers contribute to the ongoing struggle to secure peace and build socialism in the GDR.

While the DFD early on centred its work on equal gender rights and pay, when considering female workers, GDR state and party policy maintained that these questions were to remain subordinate to those of class. This prioritization limited, for example, regulation in the factory only to the Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (Free German Trade Union Confederation). As detailed by Ursula Schröter on the Digitales Deutsches Frauenarchiv, the ideological capacities and practices of the DFD gradually became limited to domestic affairs, such as family and household counselling. In that sense, GDR policy made it difficult to prioritize sisterly solidarities while maintaining an allegiance to state socialism and its party. These tensions can also be observed in relation to the experiences of migrant women in the GDR.

Nguyen Thi* is a former group leader (Gruppenleiterin) who worked at a factory near Erfurt, supporting Vietnamese female workers through organizing and managing labour structures and translation work. In an interview with Hai Nam Nguyen, she recounts her experience as a witness to the conditions and circumstances of these female workers.

As she describes, the political and economic situation in Vietnam after the war left individuals with scant labour opportunities, construing the possibility to work in the GDR as a distinct privilege. The sense of urgency was not only due to personal and familial economic necessity, but because many wanted to provide a pathway out of impoverishment for their country as well. Female contract workers under their employment agreements were not allowed to become pregnant or would face the termination of their jobs and subsequent deportation. Workers were routinely given contraceptives, but rumours circulated that the prescribed birth control pills had adverse effects on their fertility, leading many to refuse them. In the case of pregnancy, fearing economic instability, insecure residency status in the GDR, and social pressures amongst their communities, many workers felt forced to resort to abortion. The absence of first-hand accounts of such instances continues the silence around these cases that remain mostly undocumented and unspoken. But the traces of these cases resonate within the first and second generations of Vietnamese contract workers.

*name has been changed