Abstract
The Soviet decision of November 1920 to legalize abortion on social as well as medical grounds set in motion heated discussions among physicians, not only in Russia, but also in Germany, where the fate of paragraph 218 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalized abortion, was being fiercely debated. This paper compares the attitudes of the champions and critics of Soviet legalization in the two countries. The comparison reveals multiple instances of selective perception of the Russian policy. The puzzle of the paper is the persistence of that selective perception in the face of intense and ongoing communication between Soviet and German physicians interested in the abortion issue. The paper speculates that the selective perception had a political utility for both communities of physicians.
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