What modernization is still has to be negotiated

Much is positive about the coalition plans for law, justice and the Basic Law (GG); What stands out is letting young people vote for the Bundestag. The whole thing looks like an overdue modernization program. The fact that it deserves approval does not mean that modernization can solve problems or pacify conflicts. It’s a promise; it has to prove itself.

The deletion of § 219a leads to a gray area

An example of this ambivalence is the now widely welcomed and highly symbolic deletion of Section 219a of the Criminal Code, which prohibits advertising for abortion. It can also be used to prosecute doctors who provide objective information about their medical services. This is rightly seen as patronizing. On the other hand, Paragraph 218 of Abortion, which is supposed to accompany the ban on advertising, is not on the deletion program for apparently well-considered reasons. Abolition plus non-abolition means that a crime may be advertised. Here modernization is heading into the gray area.

Another issue of life and death: The new coalition also wants to regulate what the old coalition left behind when it comes to assisting suicide. The pressure to modernize comes here from the Federal Constitutional Court. With its 2020 judgment that there is a basic right to self-determined death, it touches on religious convictions, moral traditions, and cultural agreements. How strong is shown by a decision that was only published on Thursday. In this, the Karlsruhe court considers it at least possible that prisoners can assert a claim to a humane, self-determined death in custody (Az .: 2 BvR 828/21). It is obvious that the state would have to help them in some way; for example, to procure medication or to allow access to professional euthanasia. Although the death penalty has been abolished in Germany (Art. 102 GG), in this way it could in future become a state task to help those who have been punished to die.

Self-executions in prisons are still a strange idea

At the moment these are still strange ideas: self-executions in prisons under official supervision. Or clinics that publicly advertise particularly gentle or particularly inexpensive methods to terminate pregnancies. In both cases it can be said that such phenomena are expressions of self-determination and are therefore to be accepted; that here a society is emancipating itself from state-sanctioned taboos. But it is also evident that there is a price to be paid for this. And that self-determination is an important principle, but not the only answer to all ethical questions.

As nice as the coalition program looks, it is clear that modernization cannot be prescribed, but must be negotiated. It is a process. Nor will it remain without contradiction. The world is full of contradictions, and so is modernization.