Emma Teworte
Postdoctoral Associate Member
Leave to Supplicate Granted: June 2026
Research Topic: Bleeding Bodies, Trusted Hands: Illegal Abortions in Germany, c.1930-1955
Specialising in 20th-century Germany, I am a historian of gender, reproduction and everyday life.
My DPhil research examined illegal abortions in Germany between the 1930s and 1950s. We tend to think of abortions in highly politicised terms. But for mid-20th-century Germans, they were also part of everyday life. In my thesis, I draw on a rich archive of police and court records to explore how abortions were experienced and policed in Nazi, East and West Germany. I examine how abortions were enmeshed within the social relations of working-class communities, how women experienced pregnancy and abortion in their bodies, and how different regimes criminalised the termination of pregnancies. Centring the stories of women and men, I write a social, political and bodily history of abortion.
Methodologically, I am particularly interested in drawing on the approaches of early modern historians, and bridging the divide we sometimes draw between modern- and pre-modern histories.
My work is forthcoming in Past & Present and has been published in German History. I also contribute to efforts to memorialise abortionists who during Nazism were incarcerated in concentration camps as ‘professional criminals’ (see one such biography here).
