How Nazi family policies seem to be the model for Trump’s abortion playbook.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz speaks at a Biden-Harris campaign and DNC press conference on July 17, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.(Jim Vondruska / Getty Images)
All fascist regimes seek to control women’s bodies.
As we careen toward the 2024 presidential election, let’s focus on one irrefutable fact: 13 states have banned abortion. This trend shows no sign of slowing down. Women who are victims of incest or rape can’t get an abortion in nine states. The Heritage Foundation supports even more extensive restrictions in 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, constituting a conservative backlash to the significant gains women in Germany had made in education, employment, and sexual independence over the previous decade.
Four months after Hitler took power, women lost their reproductive rights. Abortion, which had been decriminalized in 1927—an era when pregnancy commonly endangered a woman’s life—was completely banned. The Nazi government reinstated an 1871 law that criminalized abortion.
Women’s clinics—which provided abortion services and birth control—were shut down.
Nineteen thousand women who held positions in regional and local government offices were abruptly fired. Women lawyers were barred from serving as judges or public prosecutors. Women 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 high school curriculum for girls 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 “women’s emancipation”: “We do not think it proper for woman to invade the world of man, to enter his territory; instead, we think it natural for these worlds to remain separate.” 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 the woman is in the family, and her most glorious duty is to bear children.”
Nazi policies encouraged a return to traditional gender roles by incentivizing 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 Reichsmark if an employed wife quit her job. If she bore no children, the couple was required to pay back the full amount. If she gave birth to one baby, the couple received a credit of 250 Reichsmark; if she gave birth to two babies, 500 Reichsmark; if she gave birth to three, 750 Reichsmark. 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, blond women in peasant garb cradling babies proliferated in posters, magazines, and newspapers. “German men want real German women again,” asserted a 1933 Nazi handbook.
Abortion legislation in Nazi Germany unquestionably reflected a deeply misogynistic ideology. The pronatalist agenda underpinning the legislation was also unquestionably racist. Alarmed by the declining birth rate in Germany, Hitler and his lackeys believed that only “racially pure” women belonging to the so-called Aryan race should have babies. Abortion was permitted for Jews.
Project 2025 calls for the implementation of a national surveillance program overseen by the US Department of Health and Human Services to track women in all 50 states who seek abortions. “HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.” Every state would also be required to submit data on spontaneous 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 pregnancy termination. Gestapo files bulged with the names, addresses, and occupations of women suspected of aborting their 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 in Germany annually. Surveillance efforts intensified. Prison sentences lengthened. The 1943 Law on Protection of Marriage, Family, and Motherhood instituted the death penalty for doctors and anyone else who dared to perform an abortion. Still, women continued to terminate their pregnancies.
The same holds true in the United States today. In spite of abortion bans across the country, over 1 million abortions were performed in 2023, an increase of 11 percent since 2020.
We now confront a second Trump presidency.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
While comparisons between Nazi Germany and the United States can yield facile and decidedly false analogies, there is sufficient reason for alarm. Fringe neofascists and mainstream Republicans share the belief that women should not have sovereignty over their own bodies. So does Project 2025’s coalition of 100 conservative organizations, which have united to support a massive expansion of presidential power. Trump brags that he will gut the Constitution if he is reelected president, and what was once unimaginable is very much upon us.
Control of women’s reproductive choices is a bellwether of a more expansive assault on democracy. This is no time for complacency.
Rebecca DonnerRebecca Donner is a 2023–24 fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and an elected fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler, which won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and the Chautauqua Award.