Emma Teworte
My research examines police investigations and court trials concerning illegal abortions in Germany between the early 1930s and mid-1950s. On one level, I study how policies criminalising abortion were implemented in practice and which assumptions drove the authorities when interrogating, charging and sentencing those involved in abortions.
However, it is the predominantly working-class women and men caught in the police’s net that take centre-stage in my work. Expanding beyond frames of victimhood that have dominated discussions of illegal abortion during the period, I trace the trajectory of reproductive decision-making and the relationships and emotions involved in procuring or performing an abortion. I read documents originally constructed to criminalise women and men as sources for re-claiming their perceptions of women’s bodies and their gendered social obligations. I also foreground the role and subjectivity of those who we would today call abortion providers.
Overall, I see my research as centring around both how abortion provides a lens onto the space where class, gender and sexual norms were negotiated within the racialised Volksgemeinschaft (and its post-1945 incarnation) and between citizens and the state.
In conversation with my work, I also maintain an interest in queer history and the politics of memory.
I hold a BA in History and Politics and an MSt in Modern European History, both from the University of Oxford. Previously, I have worked in the curatorial team at the House of European History in Brussels.
