Blast from the Past: “An Embryo Speaks”

As my friend (and brilliant future legal scholar) Lindsey pointed out the other day, another issue to query into when we address our society’s attitude toward abortion is the responsibility of the state.

Roe v. Wade argues that “a State may properly assert important interests in safeguarding health, in maintaining medical standards, and in protecting potential life” (my italics). This is why it is considered criminal, except for health reasons, to abort a fetus past the point of viability. Yet, specifically, no court has asserted that the state must pay for the care of those children whose potential lives it has sought to preserve for its own interest.

While doing some research the other day, I came across this poem by Kurt Tucholsky, a social critic and satirist in Weimar Germany. It’s written in a Neue Sachlichkeit style, which comes off as very straight-forward and therefore somewhat harsh and even melodramatic to our ear (or perhaps that’s just my ears). But it’s quite interesting for a number of reasons:

1. Germany at this time actually had a universal health care system, which Bismarck had enacted (take note, ye other men of blood and iron!) to ward off the appeal of the Socialists. Let me spell this out: the U.S. is still struggling to implement what Germany had already initiated in 1883.

2. Note the social-economic concerns — in mainstream Weimar, abortion rights were hardly ever argued for on bodily sovereignty terms, but instead were demanded because of the financial straits many working-class families found themselves in because they were unable to control the size of their family. (Knowledge of contraception was growing but still sparse at this time, especially amongst the working class, so that abortion often became a primary means of birth control.)

I think this primary focus on the abortion needs of one class can, and has historically proved, to be quite tenuous and risky (those who went too far down this route in Weimar Germany ended up on the other side of eugenics — a future post.) But it is reasonable to ask how our government can claim its right to regulate abortion on its interest in the potential life, when it does so little to support this life once born. No universal health care, inadequate foster care, 1 in 100 Americans incarcerated, etc.

And so let’s turn to Mr. Tucholsky and his take on his country’s “strange welfare system”:

An Embryo Speaks

They all take care of me: the church, the state, the physicians, the judges.

I’m supposed to grow and to thrive: I’m supposed to slumber for nine months, to take it easy

–they wish me well. They protect me and watch over me. Heaven help my parents if they do

me any harm; then they all come running. Anyone who touches me is punished; my mother

would land in jail, so would my father; the doctor who’d do it would have to stop being a

doctor; the midwife who’d assist would be locked up. You see, I’m something precious.

Yes, they take care of me: the church, the state, the physicians, the judges.

For nine months.

But once these nine months are past, I am on my own.

TB? There’s no doctor to help me. Nothing to eat? No milk? There’s no help from the state.

Torment and mental anguish? The church consoles me but does not fill my stomach. And I

Haven’t a thing to eat, so I go out and steal; immediately there’s a judge who locks me up.

For fifty years of my life no one will look after me, not a soul. I’ll have to shift for myself.

For nine months they kill one another if someone wants to kill me.

Now I ask you: Isn’t that a strange welfare system?

-Kurt Tucholsky, 1931