# Corinna Rüffer

# Corinna Rüffer

Corinna Martina Rüffer (born 11 October 1975 in Osnabrück) is a German politician of Alliance 90/[The Greens](/organizations/the-greens) and a member of the Bundestag. She entered parliament when the 18th Bundestag was constituted on 22 October 2013 and has held a seat in the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st terms, each time via the Rhineland-Palatinate state list rather than a constituency plurality. In the 21st Bundestag she is a full member of the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs and of the Petitions Committee, her parliamentary group's coordinator (Obfrau) on the Petitions Committee, and a deputy member of the Committee on Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. Her candidacy is tied to constituency 202, Trier.

She grew up in the village of Holte near Osnabrück, in Lower Saxony, and moved to Trier in 1996 after her Abitur. She studied political science and public law at the University of Trier without completing a degree, and worked in services for disabled people, in organic food retail, and as an aide to a Green member of the state parliament. She joined the Greens in 1999 and was a member of the Trier city council from 2007 to 2013. The Bundestag's published biography, which rests on her own statements, records that she is unmarried and has one child.

Before the 2013 federal election she told the *Trierischer Volksfreund* that she expected to enter through third place on the Green state list and that speculating on the direct mandate would be presumptuous. At the 2025 election the Greens received 12,843 first votes (8.3 percent) and 19,020 second votes (12.2 percent) in constituency 202, behind the CDU on first votes, and the federal returning officer listed Rüffer as elected on list place 3.

The biography for the 19th term described her as the Green Bundestag group's spokesperson for disability policy, alongside her seats on the labour and social affairs and petitions committees. In a 2013 interview she said that her daughter has Down syndrome and that the experience had sharpened her focus on participation and inclusion. She has since argued, including to Bayerischer Rundfunk in 2022, that statutory coverage of non-invasive blood tests for trisomy should not turn into routine screening, because trisomy 21 is not a condition the test can treat. In October 2026 the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung* reported that the insurers had paid for the tests for four years and that the Bundestag had decided to monitor the consequences, with Rüffer setting out why she had pressed for that review.

## Early life and education

### Upbringing near Osnabrück

Corinna Rüffer was born on 11 October 1975 in Osnabrück. She grew up in Holte, a village near Osnabrück in Lower Saxony. A 2016 profile in the Bundestag text archive, drawing on her own account, describes a politically conservative household in which the family traditionally voted for the [Christian Democratic Union](/organizations/christian-democratic-union-of-germany), and records that her father died when she was 13. She remembered those years in part because supper—often bread and butter—was accompanied by political discussion.

At a Gymnasium in Osnabrück she was class and school spokesperson and joined political arguments on behalf of fellow pupils. In the tenth grade she spent a year at a high school in Arizona through an exchange programme of the Bundestag. She later called the stay intense: it showed her the opportunities the United States offered and, she said, sharpened her sense of a European and of her own identity, especially by comparison between the German welfare state and what she called the land of “unlimited possibilities,” where social provision seemed to her less developed.

After returning, in the early 1990s, she was again active at the Gymnasium as ecological questions, right-wing extremism and refugee policy became more prominent. With others her age she co-founded a local branch of the Young Union because they wanted a way into politics. Looking back, she described that step as somewhat unreal from a later vantage point, said she did not find youthful experimentation dramatic, and added that she soon concluded her political home lay in another party. She took the Abitur in Osnabrück.

### Move to Trier, studies and early work

In 1996, while she was looking for a place to study after the Abitur, Rüffer moved to Trier in Rhineland-Palatinate. She began a course in political science and public law at the University of Trier and did not complete it. She has given two reasons for choosing the city: she found it beautiful, and she could keep her horse, Milan, there. The *Trierischer Volksfreund* later described the arrival in Trier as more a matter of chance than of a fixed plan.

She told the same newspaper that she left the degree because practical politics had come to the fore. During that period she took part in university politics and began to follow municipal politics in Trier. The biography published by the Bundestag, which the parliament states is based on members’ own information, lists several years of work with disabled people, in organic retail, and as a staff member of a Landtag deputy.

Local reporting identifies one of those posts more closely: she organised the constituency office of Reiner Marz, a deputy of Alliance 90/The Greens in the Landtag of Rhineland-Palatinate. She continued work with asylum seekers in her free time, telling the *Volksfreund* that the subject had never let her go. In the 2016 Bundestag profile she said that the Landtag member she worked for sat on that parliament’s petitions committee and that the job had already meant dealing with individual problems and looking for solutions; the same profile records her engagement for refugees and for people with impairments.

## Party career and local office

### Entry into Alliance 90/The Greens

Rüffer had come to Trier in 1996 to study political science and public law at the University of Trier. In a 2016 Bundestag portrait she said that, a year before becoming a district spokesperson, she campaigned for Alliance 90/The Greens in the 1998 federal election without being a member, motivated by the chance to end sixteen years under [Helmut Kohl](/people/helmut-kohl) and to help form the first red-green federal government. She said she then wanted a member's vote rather than to remain an unaffiliated supporter. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament states rests on members' own information, dates membership from 1999 and a first term as spokesperson of the Trier-Saarburg district association from 1999 to 2006; the portrait says she was elected at 23 and held the post for more than ten years in all. Later profiles are looser, dating the first election to 1998 or the terms to 1998–2008 and 2010–2012, while the Volksfreund, reporting her return to the executive in June 2010, gave 1999 to 2006.

### Offices in the district and state party

On 27 April 2005 the members' assembly for Trier and Trier-Saarburg re-elected the sitting spokespersons. Rüffer, a 29-year-old politics student in Trier-Euren, continued beside Wolf Buchmann. The report said her local work particularly supported refugee and human-rights initiatives, and that as spokesperson of the state working group on social affairs she was arguing for a fairer Green labour-market and social policy. The Bundestag biography also lists the Rhineland-Palatinate party council from 2002 to 2006, and from 2005 to 2009 the spokespersonship of both the state working group on migration and flight and the group on social affairs and health. In September 2007 the Volksfreund still called her spokesperson of the statewide groups on social affairs and asylum, and reported that she had not stood again as district spokesperson in 2006.

On 22 June 2010, after accusations that outgoing spokespersons Heide von Schütz and Sascha Gottschalk had failed to secure a promising state-list place for Buchmann — charges both rejected — the association elected a new executive. Rüffer beat von Schütz by 24 votes to 20, Thorsten Kretzer beat von Schütz 24 to 22, and Buchmann became treasurer.

On 15 December 2011 members voted 40 to 2 to split the association into a city body and a rural-district body. Rüffer and Kretzer were elected equal spokespersons of the new Kreisverband Stadt Trier, described as the legal successor, with Buchmann again treasurer; Boris Bulitta and von Schütz led the new Kreisverband Trier-Saarburg. The Bundestag biography dates the name Kreisverband Trier from 2012 and lists her as spokesperson until 2013, while the September 2013 profile called her by then a Beisitzerin of the city association.

### Trier city council

In September 2007 she took a council seat from the reserve list after Clement Atzberger resigned a mandate he had seldom attended; the Greens then held nine seats. The paper called the 31-year-old a party left-winger and a social-policy specialist; she said she was glad to accept and would keep the social-affairs and asylum focus, while Atzberger's place on the building and transport committee went to Siegrun Priemer.

In March 2008 the Green group carried a resolution demanding a local vote for foreign residents from outside the European Union, not only for EU citizens. The CDU voted against, partly arguing that the council lacked competence, and the UBM abstained; Lord Mayor Klaus Jensen answered that the people concerned lived in Trier. Rüffer said the vote had shown that migrants were welcome, and an SPD councillor put the number of residents with a non-EU nationality at 6,000.

At the 2009 council election the Greens received 337,822 votes, 17.6 percent, and 10 seats. Rüffer, eighth on the list, was seated with 12,872 votes; Hans-Peter Simon, twelfth with 11,995, stayed a substitute. In the allocation of 26 August 2009 she was a full member of the committee for department II and of the school-authority committee, and a substitute on the steering, audit, youth-welfare and procurement bodies and on the committees for departments III and IV.

On 2 February 2011 she argued the Greens' motion on the state centre for people required to leave the country (Landesunterkunft für Ausreisepflichtige) in Trier-Nord, calling the "disproportionately long accommodation" harassment and a punishment-like measure. On a proposal from Hermann Kleber the text became a petition asking the state government to close [the centre](/organizations/the-centre) rather than a direct demand, and it passed with four abstentions: three FDP members present, and the independent Johannes Verbeek, who wanted an explicit right to remain. People in the gallery held slips reading "Nie wieder Lufa". Rüffer afterwards called the legal basis very shaky and the centre morally unjustifiable, and described the debate as a high point of the council. Interior minister Karl Peter Bruch of the SPD said the centre was still needed to enforce departures, including where people concealed their identity; about 35 residents, mostly from Asia and Africa, remained there because identity had not been established.

The Bundestag biography records the council seat from 2007 to 2013. After her election to the Bundestag she resigned it, and on 3 December 2013 Jensen swore in Simon as the Green replacement.

## Bundestag candidacies and election results

### The 2005 campaign

At the federal election of 18 September 2005, Rüffer was the constituency candidate of Alliance 90/The Greens in Wahlkreis 205 Trier and stood third on the party's Rhineland-Palatinate state list. The constituency consisted of the city of Trier and the district of Trier-Saarburg. She received 7,863 first votes, 5.6 percent of 140,156 valid first votes. Bernhard Kaster of the CDU won the direct seat with 60,422 votes (43.1 percent), ahead of Karl Diller of the SPD on 56,943 (40.6 percent). Green second votes in the constituency were 12,467 (8.9 percent). She was not elected. In its report on the election, using the then preliminary national result, the state statistical office assigned the Greens two Rhineland-Palatinate seats and named Ulrike Höfken-Deipenbrock and Josef Philip Winkler.

The same two areas formed the constituency at later elections; only the number changed, to 204 in 2009 and 2013, 203 in 2017 and 2021, and 202 in 2025. In 2009 Rüffer was not the Green candidate. Sascha Gottschalk was, and the direct seat again went to Kaster, with 61,594 first votes (45.7 percent) against Gottschalk's 14,109 (10.5 percent).

### List places and entry in 2013

Elections to the Bundestag use a first vote for a constituency candidate and a second vote for a closed state list, whose order the party fixes and voters cannot change. Until 2021 the candidate with the most first votes received the constituency seat, and further members came from the list in that fixed order, skipping anyone already elected in a constituency; the second votes determined how many seats the party won.

On 22 September 2013 the Trier constituency was still numbered 204. Rüffer was the Green candidate and again third on the state list, behind Tabea Rößner and Tobias Lindner. Kaster, the CDU candidate, won the direct seat. The final result gave him 67,281 first votes (48.8 percent), [Katarina Barley](/people/katarina-barley) of the SPD 42,879 (31.1 percent) and Rüffer 9,555 (6.9 percent); Green second votes in the constituency were 13,157 (9.5 percent). The Greens' three Rhineland-Palatinate members all came from the list, in list order: Rößner, Lindner and Rüffer. The 18th Bundestag held its constitutive sitting on 22 October 2013, when Rüffer took her seat.

### Results from 2017 to 2025

Rüffer was the Green constituency candidate in Trier in 2017, 2021 and 2025, while the district kept the number 203 for the first two of those elections and became 202 for the election of 2025. She was also third on the state list in each of those years. The constituency seat went to other candidates in 2017 and 2021 and was left unfilled in 2025.

For 2017, a Green party congress in Idar-Oberstein on 11 December 2016 placed Rößner first and Lindner second, and elected Rüffer third; all three were unopposed. On 24 September 2017 Andreas Steier of the CDU won Wahlkreis 203 with 56,611 first votes (37.9 percent). Barley received 50,283 (33.7 percent) and Rüffer 9,645 (6.5 percent); Green second votes in the constituency were 13,512 (9.0 percent). Statewide the Greens again took 7.6 percent of second votes, and the state statistical office reported that the first three places on their list entered the Bundestag.

In 2021 the constituency committee admitted Steier for the CDU, [Verena Hubertz](/people/verena-hubertz) for the SPD and Rüffer for the Greens in Wahlkreis 203. Hubertz won the direct seat. The final count gave her 47,942 first votes (33.0 percent), Steier 40,299 (27.7 percent) and Rüffer 18,939 (13.0 percent), her highest first-vote share in the district; Green second votes there were 22,708 (15.6 percent). A postal ballot of the state party had again put Rößner, Lindner and Rüffer in the first three list places. The Greens won no constituency in Rhineland-Palatinate, so their seats came from the list, and their statewide second-vote share rose from 7.6 percent in 2017, when those three places had been enough, to 12.6 percent.

At the election of 23 February 2025 the constituency was numbered 202. Dominik Sienkiewicz of the CDU led the first votes with 47,826 (30.8 percent), 875 votes ahead of Hubertz on 46,951 (30.2 percent); Rüffer received 12,843 (8.3 percent), and Green second votes were 19,020 (12.2 percent). From this election a plurality of first votes no longer confers a seat by itself: in each state, a party's constituency leaders are ranked by first-vote share and receive seats only up to the number justified by its second votes, a rule the Federal Returning Officer calls Zweitstimmendeckung. The official result left Wahlkreis 202 unoccupied for lack of that coverage, and Sienkiewicz did not enter the Bundestag. Rüffer was elected from third place on the Green state list, behind Misbah Khan and [Armin Grau](/people/armin-grau); Hubertz returned on the SPD list rather than as the constituency member.

## Parliamentary offices

### Committee memberships

Since she entered the Bundestag in 2013, Corinna Rüffer of Alliance 90/The Greens has in each term been an ordinary member of the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs and of the Petitions Committee. In the 21st Bundestag her chamber biography also lists a deputy seat on the Committee on Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, and names her Obfrau of the Petitions Committee. The Green parliamentary group records the same ordinary and deputy seats and gives her function in the group as spokesperson for petitions.

The deputy seats changed around that core. The archived biography for the 18th Bundestag (2013–2017) shows ordinary membership of the labour and social affairs committee and the Petitions Committee, the Obfrau role on the latter, and a deputy seat only on the Committee on Health. In the 19th Bundestag (2017–2021) those posts continued, with an additional deputy seat on the Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment beside health. In the 20th Bundestag (2021–2025) the health deputy seat remained, under the short title Gesundheitsausschuss, and the education-and-research deputy seat did not. Abgeordnetenwatch's committee tables reproduce the same roles for each term. The 19th-term biography, which the Bundestag states rests on the member's own information, also described her as the Green group's spokesperson for disability policy from October 2013. The archived text for the 20th term and the current biography do not repeat that title.

### The Petitions Committee

The Obfrau post is a group office, not the committee chair. In the Bundestag glossary the Obleute are each parliamentary group's main contact with its leadership inside a committee: one per group, they set that group's line, agree agendas and plan the work. Archived biographies name Rüffer the Greens' Obfrau on the Petitions Committee in the 18th, 19th and 20th terms, as does the current biography. At the committee's constitution on 11 November 2021—19 ordinary members, temporarily chaired by Vice-President Yvonne Magwas—she was recorded as Obfrau. On 10 June 2026 she was among the coordinators present as acting chair [Hülya Düber](/people/hulya-duber) handed the 2025 report to President of the Bundestag [Julia Klöckner](/people/julia-klockner).

The committee is one of the few the Basic Law requires the Bundestag to appoint. Article 17 gives everyone the right to address requests or complaints in writing, alone or with others, to the competent bodies and to the popular representation. Article 45c assigns the Petitions Committee the requests and complaints sent to the Bundestag under that article, and leaves the powers used in examining complaints to a federal law. The report presented in June 2026 recorded 12,399 petitions in 2025. Ten published petitions drew more than 30,000 co-signatures, then the quorum for a public hearing, and the committee held four public sittings.

Single petitions are reported in the plenary as well as coordinated through the Obleute. On 27 June 2024, in the 178th sitting of the 20th Bundestag, the chair gave Rüffer the floor for the supplementary report on Sammelübersicht 608, which contained one petition. She said it asked for student aid under the federal training-assistance scheme without regard to parental income, for young people who had grown up in foster families or in residential child-and-youth services after parental custody and the right to decide where the child lives had been removed, and that the groups agreed an unfairness had to be dealt with. The same sitting she spoke for the Greens on the committee's annual report for 2023.

### Belgium–Luxembourg group and outside posts

These parliamentary groups are not law-making committees. The Bundestag describes them as bodies, formed afresh each term by the Presidium, that keep contacts with other parliaments through visits, meetings and personal contact; the work is not aimed at statutes or treaties. In the 21st term, 47 groups cover relations with 180 countries. Practice is that a member joins at most three, and that each parliamentary group which does not hold the chair may name one deputy. For the 20th term the chamber's list of group boards names Patrick Schnieder of the CDU/CSU as chair of the Belgium–Luxembourg group and Rüffer as the Green deputy chair, with further deputies from the SPD, the FDP and the AfD. The current biography again lists her as deputy chair. The archived biographies for the 18th and 19th terms do not.

The Bundestag notes that the narrative biographies are based on members' own statements. Rüffer's states membership of the Multikulturelles Zentrum Trier and of the Trierer Arbeitskreis für Montessori-Pädagogik, an honorary place on the advisory board of the Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Integrationsfirmen since December 2014, and an honorary place on the advisory board of nestwärme e.V. Deutschland since October 2021. The disclosure block required under the members' code of conduct lists the two board seats, not the two Trier associations: honorary membership of the advisory board of the Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Inklusionsfirmen e.V. in Berlin, and of nestwärme e.V. Deutschland in Trier. Disclosures from the 18th and 19th terms used the earlier name Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Integrationsfirmen for the Berlin body. Abgeordnetenwatch, using those filings, shows the Inklusionsfirmen seat as entered on 24 May 2017 and attached to every mandate from 2013–2017 through 2025–2029, and the nestwärme seat as entered on 8 November 2022 for the mandates from 2021 onward. Both are marked honorary, and neither is given a published income band.

## Disability policy

### The Federal Participation Act and the UN convention

As disability-policy spokesperson of the Green group in the Bundestag, Rüffer judged the Federal Participation Act (*Bundesteilhabegesetz*) against the [Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities](/facts/convention-on-the-rights-of-persons-with-disabilities), which Germany ratified in 2009. The CDU/CSU–SPD bill was to shift integration assistance (*Eingliederungshilfe*) from social assistance into Book IX of the Social Code. Labour minister Andrea Nahles (SPD) called that a system change. At first reading on 22 September 2016 Rüffer said the draft would not improve disabled people’s situation.

In *taz* that June she said assistance had not left the welfare system. Claims would still depend on income and assets, including a partner’s; a €25,000 allowance would not cover people who also needed care at home, left near €2,600. Limiting wishes to what was “reasonable”, she argued, would push those needing round-the-clock help into institutions. The Greens wanted benefits without a means test and choice “without adverse cost comparisons”. That May she said equal participation was still a dream.

On 1 December 2016 the Bundestag passed the Act with the CDU/CSU and the SPD, against [Die Linke](/organizations/die-linke), the Greens abstaining. Katrin Göring-Eckardt called it “a beginning, nothing more”. Coalition speakers denied a savings law and cited about €800 million a year, with income up to €30,000 and assets up to €50,000 exempt from 2020. Rewrite motions failed. After late amendments Rüffer said the text had been “roughly patched at the worst points” and that the exit from welfare had failed.

After the CDU/CSU–SPD government took office in 2025, Chancellor [Friedrich Merz](/people/friedrich-merz) told municipal leaders on 3 June that annual rises of up to 10 per cent in youth welfare and integration assistance were “no longer acceptable”, though the social state would remain. On 9 September the Greens, with Rüffer as first signatory, tabled Drucksache 21/1545, “Securing self-determination and strengthening participation”. It treated February 2025 proposals from the supra-local social-assistance bodies, Merz’s review and coalition-agreement “flat rates” (*Pauschalierungen*) as a threat to person-centred benefits under sections 117 and following of Book IX, and asked ministers to protect choice of setting, bar official placement rights and avoid cuts dressed up as efficiency.

### Accessibility, transport and the thalidomide foundation

Since 2002 the Disability Equality Act has bound federal authorities more tightly than private providers. A 2026 cabinet bill (Drucksache 21/5140) proposed “reasonable accommodations” by private providers—a portable ramp, or reading a menu—without a disproportionate burden, plus free conciliation. Barriers in publicly used parts of federal buildings were to go by 2035 as an aim and by 2045 as a duty.

At first reading on 7 May 2026, Social Affairs minister [Bärbel Bas](/people/barbel-bas) introduced the bill; *taz* reported that she “would have wished for more”. Rüffer called it a “slap in the face” and a gift to the business lobby: 2045 would leave a generation waiting, and treating building changes, even a simple ramp, as disproportionate emptied reasonable accommodation. The Green motion was Drucksache 21/5335. CDU speaker [Wilfried Oellers](/people/wilfried-oellers) said the coalition agreement had named 2035 and that duties on firms had to stay reasonable, because barriers could be removed only with business, not against it. SPD member [Heike Heubach](/people/heike-heubach) said economic interests too often came first.

Local transport had missed its own date. Since 2013, section 8(3) of the Passenger Transport Act has told transport plans to aim at “full accessibility by 1 January 2022”, exceptions aside. In Drucksache 21/1946 of 1 October 2025, co-signed by Rüffer, the Greens said that date was more than three and a half years past, services still inadequate, and the duty only a planning rule whose exception the 2025 coalition agreement left untouched.

In October 2019 the Contergan Foundation wrote to 58 survivors in Brazil whose mothers had taken Sedalis, containing thalidomide from Grünenthal and made by a licensee. *[Der Spiegel](/organizations/der-spiegel)*, with NDR and SWR, reported an intended revocation “with effect for the future”, because Sedalis was not classed as a Grünenthal product, although some recipients had been recognised more than 45 years earlier. Grünenthal said the foundation itself had decided nearly 50 years before that Sedalis fell under the Act. The Brazilian payments were about €2.8 million in 2018. On 18 June 2020, debating the Fifth Amending Act, Rüffer—rapporteur on the file since 2013—said the Greens would back a ban on later withdrawal, and that needing such a ban was itself a scandal. She counted about 60 people, chiefly in Brazil but also Mexico and Finland, and said the foundation had not read a public licence or spoken to Grünenthal first. Coalition speakers agreed that withdrawal after decades was unacceptable. Section 16, as later in force, permits it only for intentionally false or incomplete statements by the beneficiary.

### Pandemic triage

In January 2021, during the [COVID-19 pandemic](/drivers/covid-19-pandemic), Rüffer cited Robert Koch Institute figures that about two-thirds of coronavirus deaths were not in intensive care. As reported by the *Deutsches Ärzteblatt*, she said advance directives did not explain that pattern and suspected a “pre-triage” in nursing homes, with very old patients “sorted out from the start”. Justice minister [Christine Lambrecht](/people/christine-lambrecht) called selection by “prospects of success” unacceptable. Karl Lauterbach, then an SPD health spokesman, thought doctors were choosing palliative care with families or under advance directives, not rationing to spare intensive-care beds.

On 16 December 2021 the First Senate of the Federal [Constitutional Court](/organizations/constitutional-court), in 1 BvR 1541/20, held that parliament had breached Article 3(3), second sentence, of the Basic Law by failing to prevent disadvantage because of disability if intensive-care places could not treat everyone. Safeguards for the severely disabled complainants were required; their design was left to parliament. The ruling was published on 28 December 2021.

The 2022 Second Act Amending the Protection against Infection Act added section 5c. In a shortage tied to a communicable disease, only current, short-term survival probability was to decide, not disability, frailty or age as such. Two specialists had to decide, and “ex-post triage”—stopping treatment already begun for someone with a better chance—was forbidden. Rüffer called the test “inherently discriminatory”, aimed at the “fittest”, and said she would vote no; five Greens and two FDP members did so. Uwe Janssens, for intensive-care physicians, said the ex-post ban left doctors fearing homicide charges. Klaus Reinhardt of the German Medical Association said indication and the patient’s will should have been criteria too.

On 23 September 2025 (1 BvR 2284/23 and 1 BvR 2285/23), published on 4 November, the First Senate voided section 5c after complaints by emergency and intensive-care specialists. The Federation, it held, lacked competence: allotting a scarce intensive-care place is not a measure “against” a communicable disease, nor covered by the public-welfare power, yet the rules limited physicians’ freedom under Article 12 to decide whether and how to treat. Such allocation rules, the court said, fall to the Länder.

## Prenatal testing

### Criticism of non-invasive prenatal tests

Non-invasive prenatal tests (NIPT) estimate, from cell-free fetal DNA in a pregnant woman's blood, the chance of trisomy 13, 18 or 21, the last of these also known as Down syndrome. On 19 September 2019 the Federal Joint Committee decided that statutory health insurance could pay for such a test in justified individual cases and after medical counselling, once a mandatory patient leaflet existed. Billing began in July 2022. The aim was to avoid amniocentesis or chorionic-villus sampling, which the committee's chair, Josef Hecken, said could end in miscarriage in five to ten of every 1,000 examinations. A positive result is not a diagnosis and still requires invasive confirmation; Hecken said the narrow conditions were meant to prevent use as screening.

Corinna Rüffer, disability-policy spokesperson for Alliance 90/The Greens, opposed that course in a Bundestag orientation debate on 11 April 2019. She said the health system exists to heal, that Down syndrome is not a disease the test could cure, and that the test generally serves selection, because the great majority of fetuses suspected of having trisomy 21 were aborted. The *Tagesspiegel* reported in April 2024 that she is the mother of a daughter, then in her early teens, who has an extra chromosome, and quoted her as saying that a child with trisomy 21 can bring a great deal of happiness, but that society must make it easier for parents to decide for such a child. The day after the vote of 8 October 2026 she told the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung* that technical means were already reducing genetic diversity and could do so further, and that coverage was drifting toward a mass examination rather than payment only where a woman needed a test.

The motion she headed cited Barmer billing data that almost 50 percent of pregnant women used an NIPT in 2024, against 32 percent a year earlier — about 25 percent of those under 26 and about 75 percent of those over 40 — and that false-positive findings in routine care were four times the theoretical rate. On those figures invasive follow-up rose slightly, by 0.1 to 2.5 per 1,000 pregnancies, rather than falling as intended.

Other insurers and medical bodies read the policy differently. On 7 October 2026 the Professional Association of Gynaecologists backed monitoring but rejected the claim that doctors recommend the test without medical relevance in order to limit liability. It called the choice the woman's after open-ended counselling, said the test often avoids invasive procedures while remaining only a screen that must be confirmed if abnormal, and called removal from the catalogue a step backwards because prenatal diagnosis should not depend on ability to pay. AOK data published in 2025 show invasive examinations for trisomies down 38 percent from 2015 to 2021, before coverage, and 54 percent from 2015 to 2024; about one AOK-insured pregnant woman in five used the test in 2023 and early 2024. Gerhard Schillinger of the AOK federal association said unnecessary amniocenteses had fallen and that use looked responsible. In the 2019 debate, Die Linke member Cornelia Möhring paired equal worth of lives with women's unrestricted say over their bodies, and the chair of the German Ethics Council was reported as insisting on respect for parents' decisions either way.

### Cross-party initiatives in the Bundestag

The parliamentary effort was not a Green initiative alone. On 16 June 2023 the Bundesrat called for monitoring of NIPT coverage and for an expert body. On 28 February 2024, 121 members of the SPD, CDU/CSU, Greens, FDP and the then Left group tabled a group motion to that end (Drucksache 20/10515). The first names were Rüffer, Hubert Hüppe (CDU), Sören Pellmann (Left), [Stephan Pilsinger](/people/stephan-pilsinger) (CSU), Michael Brand (CDU, Fulda), Pascal Kober (FDP) and Dagmar Schmidt (SPD, Wetzlar). On 24 April 2024 the Bundestag debated the motion and referred it to the Health Committee.

Rüffer was again lead signatory of the successor text of 28 January 2026 (Drucksache 21/3873), with members of the CDU/CSU, SPD, Greens and Die Linke, among them Brand, Pilsinger, Pellmann and Schmidt. It did not propose to ban the test or to amend the maternity-care guideline. It asked the federal government to collect data on counselling, on uptake and its reasons, on later invasive tests and on the birth rate of children with trisomy 21; to present first results by 30 June 2027; to appoint an interdisciplinary body on the legal, ethical and health-policy basis of prenatal genetic tests that offer no treatment; and to report back to the Bundestag.

On 8 October 2026 the House adopted an amendment, moved by Brand and [Marja-Liisa Völlers](/people/marja-liisa-vollers), stating that access to the insured test, where there is a justified medical indication, must not be made harder than it already is. Plenary minutes 21/99 record the final roll-call on the amended motion as 527 in favour, 18 against and 23 abstentions, from 568 votes cast; the chair had first announced 529 yes votes from 570 ballot cards. The amendment itself passed by 511 to 24, with 31 abstentions. The text is a political request to the government, not a statute and not a withdrawal of the benefit. Brand, Schmidt, Pellmann, Pilsinger, [Max Lucks](/people/max-lucks), Paula Piechotta and [Katrin Staffler](/people/katrin-staffler) spoke; Rüffer did not. [Carmen Wegge](/people/carmen-wegge) (SPD) argued for a right both to know and not to know, and said the blood test, unlike amniocentesis, is less dangerous to the fetus.

## Other political positions

### Migration and asylum

From 2005 to 2009 Rüffer spoke for the Rhineland-Palatinate Alliance 90/The Greens working group on migration and flight, and for the state working group on social affairs and health. Her Bundestag biography also lists membership of the Multikulturelles Zentrum Trier. In July 2015, as Trier debated reception places and safe-country status for Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro, she said asylum must not depend on the country of origin and asked for a lasting federal share of the costs.

In February 2016, as the Bundestag considered Asylum Package II, she questioned whether a decision within 48 hours could still leave room for a lawyer and for procedural support. She wanted faster but still fair procedures, opposed widening the list of safe countries of origin in place of individual examination, and said clearing for unaccompanied minors could not be done in a few days.

On 27 February 2026 the Bundestag passed the bill adapting German law to the reform of the Common European Asylum System (GEAS-Anpassungsgesetz; printed papers 21/1848, 21/2460 and 21/4321) by 309 votes to 260, with two abstentions and 59 members not voting; the Green group cast 83 votes against and none in favour. The official name-by-name list records Rüffer as voting no. The day before, group co-chair [Britta Haßelmann](/people/britta-hasselmann) said humanitarian and constitutional objections remained and that children and young people would be housed under stricter conditions. In February 2025 she told Abgeordnetenwatch she opposed checks on the Luxembourg border, used daily by thousands of commuters from her constituency, and preferred distribution inside the European Union, faster procedures and legal routes to what she called populist security theatre.

### The Alternative for Germany

In May 2017 she withdrew from a 7 June panel of the Trier chamber of industry and commerce and the Vereinigung Trierer Unternehmer, "Bundestagswahl 2017 – mehr Wirtschaft wagen!", because Erwin Ludwig, direct candidate of [the Alternative](/organizations/the-alternative) for Germany, was invited. Her open letter said she would discuss the regional economy and the Moselaufstieg, "but not on a platform that gives space to a right-wing populist and right-wing nationalist party". She told the *Trierischer Volksfreund* that Ludwig's position was openly xenophobic and racist, and that she would neither appear with the AfD nor send a substitute.

Ludwig said she feared a debate on economic policy. Free Democratic Party candidate Adrian Assenmacher said populism had to be answered with arguments, and some comments on her Facebook post made the same point, while others praised the refusal. Jan Glockauer, the chamber's chief executive, said members were meant to question candidates, not to give the right a stage, and that a draft flyer naming every participant had already been cleared. The panel was cancelled on 7 June for lack of interest; the paper treated a link to her withdrawal as unlikely.

After the February 2025 federal election, SWR reported her concern at the AfD score in the Trier constituency: before postal ballots, the party led in first and second votes in places such as Hermeskeil and Osburg. She said it was the task of all democratic parties to talk to people and take their worries seriously. On 5 February 2025 she told Abgeordnetenwatch she backed an application to ban the AfD so the Federal Constitutional Court could test the legal conditions. She called it more than a conservative party, citing contempt for people and disregard for democratic basics, alongside action on right-wing violence and support for civil society.

### Constituency issues in the Trier region

In March 2018 she welcomed a Rhineland-Palatinate move, with other Länder, to put long-distance rail before the Bundesrat. She said the federal government and Deutsche Bahn had to stop cities such as Trier being cut off for good, and that a grand-coalition promise to link every city above 100,000 people by 2030 had to appear in the railway's plans; she saw no sign then that long-distance trains would stop in Trier again soon.

She has opposed the Moselaufstieg, a road scheme in the federal transport infrastructure plan. Nominated in January 2017 as the Trier Greens' lead candidate, she said she would work in Berlin to remove it, called it unacceptable that transport minister [Alexander Dobrindt](/people/alexander-dobrindt) of the [Christian Social Union](/organizations/christian-social-union-in-bavaria) had overridden the state's refusal, and accused Trier CDU member Bernhard Kaster of having pushed the project through. In May 2021 she said the public had "just as little desire for this motorway as the young people" occupying the Zewen forest, and that the state's traffic-light coalition had offered little resistance. That September she wrote that a Globus store approved for Trier-Zewen would help the road's backers, that she was in touch with "Nein zum Moselaufstieg", and that a shift in Bundestag majorities could still remove the scheme from the federal plan.

## Public profile

### Media coverage

The *Trierischer Volksfreund* has followed Rüffer from her Trier candidacies through later Bundestag campaigns. A September 2013 profile recorded that she had taken 5.6 percent of first votes there in 2005 and that she has a daughter with Down syndrome, a biographical fact national interviews have since repeated. She has not won the seat. Official tables for the Trier constituency show Alliance 90/The Greens first-vote shares of 6.9 percent in 2013, 6.5 percent in 2017 and 13.0 percent in 2021; in 2025 the *Volksfreund* reported her, again the Green direct candidate, at 8.3 percent, with a return via third place on the Rhineland-Palatinate list. Reporting outside the region has clustered on disability policy and bioethics rather than on the constituency race.

In June 2016 Die Tageszeitung interviewed her on the draft Federal Participation Act; she said support for disabled people was still being handled like social assistance. In January 2021 the *Deutsches Ärzteblatt* reported her suspicion, drawn from Robert Koch Institute statistics in the COVID-19 pandemic, that many older nursing-home residents who died had never reached intensive care, which she called a form of advance triage. Deutschlandfunk, in its *Streitkultur* of 19 September 2026, billed her statement that blood tests for trisomy had a “structurally eugenic” result, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung interviewed her the next month on the same tests. Parliamentwatch lists no paid outside income: the registered posts are unpaid advisory-board seats at the Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Inklusionsfirmen, entered in 2017, and at nestwärme e.V. in Trier, entered in 2022.

### Debate over her positions

The argument that has drawn national comment is noninvasive prenatal testing for trisomies 13, 18 and 21, a statutory-insurance benefit since July 2022 when a pregnant woman and her doctor consider it necessary. On 28 February 2024 Rüffer was the lead signatory, with Hubert Hüppe of the Christian Democratic Union, [Sören Pellmann](/people/soren-pellmann) of Die Linke and [Michael Brand](/people/michael-brand), of a cross-party motion for monitoring and an expert body rather than a ban. A successor text was adopted by the Bundestag on 8 October 2026 by 527 votes to 18, with 23 abstentions, and left coverage in place where an indication is accepted. In the debate of 20 March 2026 her Green colleague [Paula Piechotta](/people/paula-piechotta), a physician, warned against controlling women in a highly personal situation, said social problems must not be solved “on the backs of pregnant women,” and added: “Do not tell women what they have to do.”

A separate clash, in May 2017, stayed regional. Rüffer withdrew from an election podium of the IHK Trier and the Vereinigung Trierer Unternehmer after learning that [Alternative for Germany](/organizations/alternative-for-germany) candidate Erwin Ludwig would take part, writing that she would not share a stage that gave a “right-wing populist and right-wing nationalist party” room. IHK chief executive Jan Glockauer called the late withdrawal a surprise. Ludwig said she was afraid to discuss economic policy, and Free Democratic Party candidate Adrian Assenmacher said populism could be met only “with arguments and an open visor.”

Disability organisations have also treated her as an interlocutor rather than only as a campaigner. On 21 May 2026 representatives of the Bundesverband Selbsthilfe Körperbehinderter met her in the Bundestag to press for stricter private-sector duties in a reform of the disability-equality law, a meeting the association itself reported. The inclusion-firm umbrella’s advisory board is the longer of the two unpaid seats in the transparency register.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/corinna-ruffer