Bodily issues are, despite their central role for feminist politics and scholarship, strangely under-researched in a systematic way. We know fairly little about the relation between body politics and the formation of different national gender regimes. The paper seeks to unravel puzzling questions about the development of gender regimes in Germany, Poland and Sweden through the lens of body politics. Under special scrutiny are the different strategies of the women´s movements to politicize bodily issues. The perspective challenges linear notions of gender policy development. Contrary to what one might expect today, historically Germany has been a pioneer of reproductive rights and sexual reform. The demand to repeal the abortion paragraph from the penal code was raised as early as 1907. During the interwar period abortion law gave rise to mass mobilization and a fairly permissive legal regulation. Despite a rather restrictive abortion law in the 1970s German feminists mobilized on a mass scale against reproductive technologies. In Sweden they were barely politicized at all. This is in accordance with a historical pattern within which claims to an abortion on demand were not raised by women´s organizations before the 1970. In the debates of the 1930 the socalled social clause was rejected with the argument that it would imply an abdication from social reform. In Poland today debates about reproductive rights as well as IVF are highly polarized. Historically, Poland was in some respect more liberal than Sweden, it neither criminalized contraceptives nor homosexuality. The analytical framework applied in the study examines the three countries as spaces of articulation and institutional assemblies that embody certain “conditions of possibility” for thinking and acting. The framework of discursive institutionalism, outlined in earlier publications, is enhanced through including temporality.