“If abortion becomes a mandatory part of medical training, the number of doctors will decrease”

Anette Kern-Besold, the head of a pregnancy counselling centre at the Diaconal Service in Schweinfurt, argued earlier this year that all medical students should be taught how to perform an abortion. According to Kern, abortions are part of the medical field. She thinks that this would help to normalise breaking off pregnancies. "It would be important to be more impartial about having an abortion", she said, according to Archywordys.

However, the organisation Action Right to Life for Everyone strongly rejects this proposal. Chairwoman Cornelia Kaminski argues that such an obligation will decrease the number of doctors in Germany, Idea reports. According to Kaminski, medical students would be scared off by compulsory abortion training. "Any doctor who has ever seen how a child develops in the womb knows that if he performs an abortion, he has to kill someone", she tells Idea. "It is not an appendix that is removed; it is a person who is killed." In Kaminski's opinion, people become doctors to heal others, not kill them.

She furthermore mentions that there is absolutely no shortage of abortion facilities in Germany. "Corresponding claims are fairy-tales."

Opinion of the church remains veiled

On March 9th, the German federal government initiated the abolition of section 219a from the Criminal Code. That means that advertising abortions, which is currently illegal, will no longer be forbidden by law anymore. The proposal still needs to be discussed by the Bundesrat and parliamentary groups in the Bundestag.

Idea researched the opinion of German churches in this issue.

The news agency discovered that the EKD, the German state church, does not take a clear position in the debate. Whereas the chairman of the Catholic German Bishops' spoke out clearly against the abolition of the advertisement ban, one of the EKD church presidents even welcomed the ban. She argued that women should be able to find information about abortions on doctors' websites.

Most EKD leaders do not mention their opinion explicitly. Many of them avoid taking a clear position, Idea writes. Almost all found that sufficient information is essential, but also considered an advertising ban to be correct. Many church leaders did not even want to comment at all. Idea concludes, therefore, that it seems as if "no other bishops want to lean out of the window with an all too clear statement."

That leaves the question of whether the EKD is sliding from an explicit pro-life stance to a more progressive side.