All fascist regimes seek to control women’s bodies.

As we approach the 2024 presidential election, let’s focus on one irrefutable fact: 13 states They have banned abortion. This trend shows no signs of slowing down. Women victims of incest or rape cannot have an abortion in nine states. The Heritage Foundation supports even broader restrictions on Project 2025. Of course, control of reproductive choices was a central tenet of authoritarian regimes, including Mussolini’s Italy and Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was also one of the first pages of the Nazi playbook, and constituted a conservative reaction to the significant advances that women in Germany had made in education, employment, and sexual independence over the previous decade.

Four months after Hitler came to power, women lost their reproductive rights. Abortion, which had been decriminalized in 1927 (a time when pregnancy commonly endangered a woman’s life), was completely prohibited. The Nazi government reinstated an 1871 law that criminalized abortion.

Women’s clinics, which provided abortion and birth control services, were closed.

Nineteen thousand women holding positions in regional and local government offices were abruptly laid off. Female lawyers were prohibited from practicing as judges or prosecutors. Female physicians could no longer receive compensation from government-sponsored insurance plans. A new quota restricted the number of women who could attend a German university. In 1932, the year before Hitler took power, 18,315 women were enrolled in German universities; in 1938 there were 5,447. The girls’ high school curriculum was revamped to focus on cooking, cleaning and mending. Kindersegen—women blessed with children—were celebrated as national heroines.

In an impassioned speech, Hitler criticized the “emancipation of women”: “We do not believe that it is appropriate for woman to invade man’s world, to enter his territory; Instead, we believe it is natural for these worlds to remain separate.” The Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, echoed this idea in a speech of his own: “The first, best and most suitable place for a woman is the family, and her most glorious duty is to have children.”

Nazi policies encouraged a return to traditional gender roles by encouraging women to abandon their careers. Under the terms of the 1933 Law for the Encouragement of Marriage, couples could receive a government loan of 1,000 Reichsmarks if an employed wife left her job. If they did not have children, the couple had to return the full amount. If she gave birth to a baby, the couple received a credit of 250 marks; if she gave birth to two babies, 500 marks; If she gave birth to three, 750 marks. The entire loan was forgiven the day she had her fourth baby. Nazi propaganda fetishized the farmer’s wife as the feminine ideal. Images of young, blonde women dressed as peasants cradling babies proliferated on posters, magazines and newspapers. “The Germans want real German women again,” stated a 1933 Nazi manual.

Abortion legislation in Nazi Germany undoubtedly reflected a deeply misogynistic ideology. The pronatalist agenda underpinning the legislation was also unquestionably racist. Alarmed by Germany’s declining birth rate, Hitler and his lackeys believed that only “racially pure” women belonging to the so-called Aryan race should have babies. Abortion was allowed to Jews.

Project 2025 calls for the implementation of a national surveillance program overseen by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to track women in all 50 states who seek abortions. “HHS must use every tool available, including cutting funding, to ensure that each state reports exactly how many abortions are performed within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the state of residence of the mother and by what method.” Each state would also be required to submit data on miscarriages, stillbirths and induced abortions and “ensure that statistics are separated by category.” This language is alarmingly reminiscent of a mandate implemented by the Nazi regime in 1935, which required hospitals to submit detailed reports of every premature birth, miscarriage, and termination of pregnancy. The Gestapo files were filled with the names, addresses and occupations of women suspected of aborting fetuses, the dates of their procedures and the instruments used to perform them.

In 1940, SS chief Heinrich Himmler was dismayed by a report that an estimated 600,000 illegal abortions were performed annually in Germany. Surveillance efforts were intensified. Prison sentences were lengthened. The Protection of Marriage, Family and Motherhood Act of 1943 instituted the death penalty for doctors and anyone else who dared to perform an abortion. Still, women continued to terminate their pregnancies.

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The same thing happens today in the United States. Despite nationwide abortion bans, In 2023, more than 1 million abortions were performed.an increase of 11 percent from 2020.

While comparisons between Nazi Germany and the United States may produce facile and decidedly false analogies, there is plenty of reason to be alarmed. Fringe neofascists and traditional Republicans share the belief that women should have no sovereignty over their own bodies. The same goes for Project 2025’s coalition of 100 conservative organizations, which have come together to support a massive expansion of presidential power. Trump boasts that he will do it gut the Constitution if he is re-elected president, and what was once unimaginable is very close to us.

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Controlling women’s reproductive choices is a barometer of a more expansive attack on democracy. This is no time for complacency.

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Rebecca Donner

Rebecca Donner is a 2023-24 Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is the author of New York Times best seller All the common problems of our day: the American woman at the heart of the German resistance to Hitlerwhich won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and the Chautauqua Award.

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