Else Ida Pauline Kienle

Else Ida Pauline Kienle (* 26 February 1900 in Heidenheim an der Brenz; † 08 June 1970 in New York), was a German physician, author and sexual reformer, who devoted herself to women’s rights and rejected the penal abortion paragraph Section 218.

Else Kienle along with Friedrich Wolf was arrested in February 1931 for “commercial abortion” and the associated infringement of Section 128. She spent six weeks in pre-trial detention and during this time kept her diary in which she reported on her imprisonment, interrogations and case examples from her own practice. She was brought daily to interrogations lasting in part three, four or five hours. This was followed in the afternoons by a session lasting several hours before the examining magistrate. In the aftermath of a seven-day hunger strike, she fell unconscious for a lengthy period and was released after a stay in hospital on the grounds of unfitness to undergo detention.

During the sessions, the examining magistrate adopted a clear position and saw himself in a didactic role, protecting the health of the national community. Many cases from Else Kienle’s practice were discussed. A selection of them is presented below.

This involved a married woman who had given birth to three children and had taken a conscious decision for an abortion. Mrs Dreyer’s husband ran a country bakery in a small village where both worked from morn till night. She was already unable to look after the three children in her care properly since she hardly had a minute for herself and her husband in addition owned vineyards, which he had to cultivate and harvest at fixed times. In autumn, faced with increasing work demands, swollen ankles and feet and the absence of her period made it evident that she was pregnant. Sometime later, a kidney disease recurred. In view of her work and motherhood, Mrs Dreyers would have had to take a break for several weeks due to illness. However, she also interpreted her kidney disease as a sign of her body rejecting the pregnancy. In the end, Else Kienle helped her.

Hanna was a talented young musician who had got to know a young artist a few years previously. The two married quickly and lived together in their atelier. Initially, her husband earned a lot of money but at some point the buyers dried up and both were worse off financially. The husband went from door to door to sell his drawings for a few marks. In the meantime, Hanna tried to earn some money by giving piano lessons. After a few months, they discovered that she was pregnant and in this financially difficult situation saw no other way out but to get hold of a Lysol solution, inject it themselves and in this way abort the pregnancy. She injected the solution and was unconscious for a few hours. When she regained consciousness, she wanted to get rid of the traces of her deed but felt weak and had severe pain and fever. Her husband brought in a doctor as quickly as possible. The latter could only provide information about her condition and mitigate her suffering with painkillers. She died after death throes lasting eight hours.

Mrs Werner concluded one of the then customary society marriages in her youth. She hardly knew her husband and also scarcely got to know him later. They travelled a lot together but otherwise had little to do with each other. In the course of her marriage, Mrs Werner became increasingly aware of her loneliness and attempted to speak to her husband about it. But the latter fended off her intimations. She thereupon withdrew ever more, spent a lot of her time taking lonely rides with her horse or staying in their hunting lodge. Her brother-in-law occasionally visited her there to whom she at first felt a friendly, later passionate, attraction. After a lengthy affair, she found herself in Else Kienle’s waiting room and wanted to know her condition for certain. She found out about her pregnancy there, which it was impossible for her to accept. Despite all her helplessness in this situation, she told her husband about it. He did not react with his otherwise customary obliging calm. Mrs Werner then went into the next room, took her rifle and shot herself.

Else Kienle knew that an abortion represented an extraordinary intervention and a risk for women’s bodies. She referred to the cases mentioned as examples in criticising the fact that doctors made little or no use of what they could do. Consequently, she regarded sloppy generalisations and defamation of the rights of self-determination as fundamentally wrong and appealed to a new, modern sense of responsibility on the part of doctors and the state.

After her release, Else Kienle and Friedrich Wolf took part in the movement against Section 218. She spoke for the “Fighting Committee” at many meetings throughout the country. The largest of these demonstrations took place on 15 April 1931 in the Berlin Sportpalast with well over 100,000 people.

She regarded her profession as doctor in highly moral terms. She saw great importance in the responsibility of doctors towards themselves and their patients and in the danger of losing sight of general concerns.

During her time as junior doctor at the so-called “police station”, the closed ward for venereal diseases in the Stuttgart Katharinenhospital, she began to think about some initial questions on the justification and limits of medical measures. She also reported on several male patients who came to her.

This case had less to do with the subject of abortion but instead with her reporting on how first one, then at some point, several male patients regularly visited her. She told of a man who presented the story of his life as a long journey. From an orphanage to an apprenticeship as decoration painter and subsequent wandering throughout Europe. After this he served as a soldier in the First World War, where he went blind as a result of a maternally-inherited disease. Now he was sitting in front of her and insisted on exposing himself. To her astonishment, he was wearing delicate women’s stockings beneath his heavy men’s boots. He revealed how he suffered from this, felt himself to be dirty and nevertheless saw it as his last escape, something that gave his life a foundation. Else Kienle’s report contains no further details except that he told her what he did not dare to say to any man. She failed to provide any explanation in this case but clearly separated him and other male patients from those male patients who had other inclinations towards her and who had to be removed by force from the practice.

Else Kienle was the first child of Otto (1872-1946) and Elisabeth Kienle (1873-1944), née Zeller. She had a younger brother who later suffered from a detachment of the retina. Her parents recognised the talent of their daughter very early on and consequently she attended, as the only girl at this time, an upper secondary school and was also the best in her class. Thanks to the support of her grandmother, she was able to hold her own against her father and complete her medical studies. In 1928, she married the banker Stefan Jacobowitz, who not only gave her a horse and two cars but also a practice of her own with a clinic.

In autumn 1932, after she had already been in pre-trial detention in 1931, she had grounds to fear being arrested again and fled to France. The marriage then ended in divorce but the couple remained on friendly terms. On the Riviera, she got to know the US businessman George LaRoe, who became her second husband. In 1935, she opened a practice once again, this time in the USA, and specialised in plastic surgery. She enjoyed professional success but never became active as a sexual reformer again. Else Kienle made a name for herself in New York as a dermatologist and cosmetic surgeon, above all in the field of reconstruction surgery.

She got to know her third husband, the dentist Dr Ernest C Gierding, in a golf club. He became her third husband in 1937, from whom she became divorced again after a brief period. Her parents visited her for the last time in the USA in 1938. During the war, contact to her family was interrupted. Only after the end of the war did she get a first message from her father, informing her that her mother had died in 1944. Her father died two years later, in 1946.

Else Kienle wrote her second book, titled “Woman Surgeon – The Autobiography of Else K. La Roe” in 1957, which was published in German in 1968 under the title Mit Skalpell und Nadel.

Else Kienle died on 8 June 1970 in New York. Just like her husband, she too was cremated and buried in his state of Oklahoma.