Kimba Allie Tichenor's Blog: Gender, Religion, and Civil Society

Working on a new essay addressing the immediate postwar debate in West Germany on donor insemination that demonstrates how this debate is connected to a larger transnational debate on changing gender norms, science's seeming triumph over religion, and nuclear angst in the early Cold War. Here is the introduction of that article still in progress:

The Donor Insemination Debate: Transnational Concerns and West German Peculiarities, 1945-1965

On March 8, 1959, the Grand Commission on Penal Law – created by the West German Federal Ministry of Justice in 1954 and charged with the task of drafting a new, more modern criminal code – voted overwhelmingly in favor of criminalizing AID (artificial insemination with donor sperm). At that time, experts estimated that fewer than 1000 children in Germany had been conceived using artificial insemination (using donor sperm or the husband’s sperm). Moreover, the German Medical Association had rejected AID on “moral grounds” in 1955 and again in 1959. Yet, West German lawmakers and other cultural elites employed hyperbolic language as part of their campaign against this seldom-used practice in Germany. Speaking to the Grand Commission, Attorney General Dr. Hanns Dünnebier (Bremen) described AID as the “specter at the gate” and declared that West Germany must “at least try to erect a bulwark against it.” Liberal media outlets such as Der Spiegel and Die Zeit described AID as “adultery in a test-tube” and “icebox-fornication.” Well-known authors, such as Ernst Jünger, depicted AID as emblematic of an emerging mechanized and dehumanized world. Film portrayals of AID, such as Alraune (1952 remake) and Frucht ohne Liebe (1956) associated AID with changing gender norms and science’s triumph over nature and religion. So why did this fertility procedure, seldom used in Germany, spark cultural panic and calls for legal regulation in the immediate postwar era? Given this outcry, why did West German lawmakers abandon efforts to criminalize AID by the mid-1960s? The answers to these questions only become apparent if we view the West German debate as part of a broader transnational debate on AID in the immediate postwar era.

AID first emerged as a hot topic in the immediate postwar era in the United States and Great Britain. But by the mid-1950s, the AID debate had spread to other European countries and beyond. Within the framework of this transnational debate, Americans and Europeans voiced concerns about changing gender norms, science’s seeming triumph over religion, and Cold War competition and the dawning nuclear age. Yet, national, regional, and local concerns also shaped how the debate was articulated, and consequently how it was resolved in each nation. In the case of West Germany, its recent National Socialist past, its defeat and postwar occupation by the Western Allies, and its location on the front lines of the Cold War all factored into how West German elites responded to AID.

Sources:

Ute Helling, Zu den Problemen der künstlichen Insemination unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des § 203 E1962 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970), 110-11.
Helling, 4-6.
Ernst Fromm, “Artifizielle Insemination,” in Die künstliche Befruchtung beim Menschen: Diskussionsbeiträge aus medizinischer, juristischer und theologischer Sicht (Cologne: Dr. Otto Schmidt KG, 1960), 31.
H. Dünnebier quoted in Maria Ries, “Über das Problem künstlicher Insemination,” Bayerisches Ärzteblatt, no. 14 (April 1959), 75-78, here 78.
See “Reagenzglas-Babys: Ehebruch in der Retort,” Der Spiegel, November 8, 1950; “Der anonyme Ehebruch,” Der Spiegel, February 5, 1958; V.G., “Kinder aus dem Katalog: Elitezüchtung durch künstliche Befruchtung?” Die Zeit, October 13, 1961.
Ernst Jünger, An der Zeitmauer (originally published in 1959) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981).
Alraune, directed by Arthur Maria Rabenalt (1952; Munich: Deutsche Styria Film) and Frucht ohne Liebe, directed by Ulrich Erfurth (1956; West Berlin: CCC Filmkunst).

Vatican II was a watershed moment in the history of the Catholic Church; these three books offer unique explorations of that event. More importantly, they point to why the battle over Vatican II still matters today -- for the future of the Church, for the struggle for women's rights inside and outside the Church, and for international political debates on human rights.

1. What Happened at Vatican II

John W. O'Malley contrasts Vatican II with earlier councils, by focusing on the language and tone adopted at the Council. He argues that Vatican II introduced a parallel new vocabulary in conciliar documents -- one that employed words such as reciprocity, collaboration, and partnership. This new language resulted in a council that for the first time produced no condemnations of errors or harsh judgments on theological deviations. The end result would be a changed relationship between members of the institutional church and the laity. O'Malley's discussion of tone and language and how it impacted Vatican II has implications for the current church and papacy of Pope Francis in that it shows that while change in the Church is best measured in centuries, subtle shifts in tone and language can lead to real change in the Church.

2. Guests in Their Own House: The Women of Vatican II

Often forgotten from current accounts is the role that women played in shaping the agenda of Vatican II. For the first time in Catholic history, 15 women were invited to serve as auditors and some of these women served on the commissions responsible for formulating documents. Elizabeth McEnroy details the history of these women and how they contributed to the Church adopting a new understanding of women in Church and society. This new understanding would spark women in subsequent decades to demand a more active role in the Church, including women's ordination as priests.

3. Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning

Faggioli offers an engaging history of the battle within the Church to define the meaning of Vatican II from the time of the Council until the end of the twentieth century. While the book focuses on the various theological debates, it does not present them in a vacuum, showing how and why Vatican II still matters for Catholics and non-Catholics, given the Church remains an important political actor on the global stage.

Abstract: The book details the crucial role that gender politics played in producing first a crisis in, and later a transformation of, German Catholicism. This transformation, I argue, facilitated the Church’s ability to exercise significant influence on national debates concerning women’s reproductive rights and the defense of life, despite a dramatic decline in traditional indices of faith, such as membership in the Church. This seeming paradox—continued political influence, on the one hand, and declining membership, on the other—has received little scholarly or media attention. Instead, most historians and pundits assume that after a brief Christian cultural and political resurgence in the 1950s, a secularized Germany emerged and the Christian churches lost their political influence. Consequently, recent victories by moral conservatives in a reunified Germany, such as the 2009 revision of Paragraph 218 mandating a three-day waiting period for late-term abortions when a fetal disability has been diagnosed, seemed for many scholars and pundits a surprising development in a nation known for its liberal attitudes on sexuality. By analyzing the evolution of Catholic discourses on celibacy, women’s ordination, contraception, abortion, and new reproductive technologies in dialogue with secular discourses and situated within the broader cultural, social, and political context, my study demonstrates that these recent political victories are inextricably linked to the moral crisis of authority in the 1960s and 1970s. From this crisis, slowly, a new Catholic theological and political identity emerged for a post-secular age. Theologically, this meant a move away from the feminized piety of the nineteenth century aimed at filling the pews with women toward a gendered theology aimed at preserving the Church’s teachings on the male celibate priesthood and marriage. Politically, it meant promoting an interventionist and theologically informed agenda that embraced new arguments and issue-specific alliances with political parties other than the self-identified Christian parties. Thus, in the 2009 abortion debate, Catholic parliamentarians linked traditional pro-life arguments to a new argument that abortion violated the rights of the disabled; as a result, many Social Democrats and Greens voted for the law, because they did not want to be seen as opponents of disability rights.