It’s like the holocaust only worse, according to babycaust.de, the German website dedicated to abortion, or as they call it: “The mass murder of unborn children.”

Every country has its nutters. The problem with these particular nutters is that their website is your best bet if you need to find a doctor who performs abortions in Germany. It provides a full list of practitioners with the “licence to kill” by town and postcode, decorated with images of hacked-up babies in petri dishes, some of them made into gifs to show the blood still dripping. Whatever for? They obviously don’t want you to go to these doctors. But they do want to make it easier for you to report these “killers” to the police.

Suddenly we are living in a country where doctors are being sentenced for giving their patients information about the 'crime of abortion'

Because while babycaust.de is legal, it is not legal for doctors to put information about abortion on their websites. That is seen as “advertising” abortion, and is dealt with under paragraph 219a, a leftover Nazi law that had been forgotten about until so-called pro-lifers started to use it to hit practitioners with lawsuits.

If that wasn’t surprising enough, their campaign is actually succeeding. Suddenly we are living in a country where doctors are being sentenced for giving their patients information about the “crime of abortion”. And make no mistake, abortion is a crime in Germany, only hardly anybody knew that either.

Our happy ignorance had a lot to do with the victories of feminism. Germany’s women’s movement started in the 1970s with the fight against section 218 of the country’s criminal code, which punished abortions with jail sentences of up to 10 years – for both the woman and the doctor. That’s why it was such a big thing when 374 film stars and other famous women declared “We’ve had abortions” on the cover of Stern magazine in 1971. Because the law didn’t mean fewer terminations; only more women dying of abortion by coathanger. Women like my great-grandmother. I am yet to meet a German person who does not have a section 218 victim in the extended family.

The cover of Stern magazine in June 1971. The strapline says ‘We’ve had abortions.’ Photograph: Stern

It was high time the law changed. And it did. In 1972 East Germany passed the most progressive law in Europe, which recognised abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy as a legal right. West Germany followed in 1974, with a slightly less revolutionary law that nonetheless legalised abortions up to the 12th week. But this was repealed a year later when the Bundesverfassungsgericht – Germany’s federal constitutional court – declared it unconstitutional. So West Germany went for a compromise that made abortion technically illegal, but allowed it to go unpunished under certain conditions.

Then came 1989 and the reunification of Germany, which meant East Germans lost their full reproductive rights as well. They too now had to be assessed by different doctors and psychologists. But the political climate had changed; there was less public outcry. Yes it was tedious going through the motions, but you knew you could get an abortion in the end. Plus it was surely only a question of time before the anachronistic section 218 was abolished; after all, most people thought it had already gone and the assessments were just a pro forma matter.

Little did we reckon with the rise of the far right, which wasn’t stupid enough to tackle section 218 directly. Instead it has chosen the much more ambiguous section 219a, which laid dormant for decades, but has now been stirred up and become the biggest threat to doctors performing abortions. The most prominent of these is GP Kristina Hänel. She was fined in 2017 under section 219a for “promoting” abortion, but the public backlash attracted so much attention that all the political parties – except the governing CDU/CSU and the far-right AfD – agreed it was time to get rid of the embarrassing law. At the time, parties backing abortion reform held the majority of Bundestag seats. But then came the 2017 federal elections. The CDU and SPD formed a grand coalition, and one of the things the SPD had to drop was its promise to get rid of section 219a. Hänel continues to fight not just her case but the whole law, and is prepared to go to the European court of human rights to do so.

As the law stands, Hänel is allowed to state on her website that she offers abortions – but nothing more. Last year Hänel’s colleague Bettina Gaber was convicted under the new reformed section 219a for using the words “medicinal, anaesthesia-free” in describing the abortions she offered. The government has made it clear that the new law isn’t about advertising any longer, it simply prohibits all information except for a link to the medical council. If I go to a counsellor – and I have to go to a counsellor if I want to an abortion – the same rule applies. They are not allowed to give me a list of doctors, only a link to the medical council – whose original list was based on information compiled by babycaust. No joke.

GP Kristina Hänel in the state court of Giessen, Germany. Photograph: Boris Roessler/AP

Recently I sat next to Hänel on a panel and wished I could have had my abortion with her. What makes her so special is that she sees her patients as human beings with different needs: that some fare better with the abortion pill, some with curettage or suction. And she gives them a choice. The most amazing thing is that she talks to her patients – before and during an abortion. My doctor had told me it was “impossible” when I asked for a local anaesthetic and gave me a general anaesthetic. Did I complain? Of course not. We have been told not to talk about abortions – apart from, of course, the people filing the complaint against Hänel.

On the panel I said: “If this goes on soon we won’t have the problem any more because so few clinics will be offering abortions.” In the past 10 years the numbers have collapsed. In Lower Bavaria only one gynaecologist performs the operation: Michael Spandau is actually retired, but as he is the only one, he keeps going. And Catholic Bavaria is not an exception. Abortion is not an integral part of a medical degree in Germany.

Hänel also explained at the conference that the Charité in Berlin, one of Europe’s biggest university hospitals, dedicates just 90 minutes teaching time to abortion. And even then all students learn about are ethical and legal problems. For this reason, the charity Medical Students for Choice organises workshops to teach students curettage – using papayas, which are the nearest to a womb they can get (when they put the instruments in too far they come out at the other end – like in a womb). A medical student in the audience raised her hand at that point and said: “We’d like to have those papaya workshops as well.” Fruit instead of rights? Let’s hope Hänel wins her case so that one day we won’t have to go to Ireland if we need an abortion.

• This article was amended on 21 January 2020 to clarify that the original medical council list of doctors was based on information compiled by babycaust.

• Mithu Sanyal is an author, academic and broadcaster based in Dusseldorf. Her most recent book is Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo