This week, the Supreme Court blocked vaccine mandates for businesses, affirming individual choice in vaccination even as it prepares to radically curtail abortion rights. The refrain “my body, my choice,” with its emphasis on individual rights, was easily appropriated by the Right and turned into a slogan for anti-vaxxers.

But looking back to the struggle for abortion access in the Weimar Republic, between World War I and the rise of the Nazi dictatorship, we can find a different way of framing this demand. While denouncing the expropriation of reproductive and domestic labor, this call for abortion rights was articulated less as a matter of individual self-determination than as a statement of solidarity: “Your body belongs to you!”

Abortion remained illegal throughout the Weimar era, yet also extremely commonplace. At the height of the Depression, the number of abortions in Germany was estimated at close to 1 million per year — almost one abortion for every live birth. Both procuring and providing abortions were banned by Paragraphs 218 and 219 of the German Criminal Code. A woman found guilty of having an abortion would be sentenced to a minimum of six months’ penal servitude, and as many as five years.