ABSTRACT
Employing a socio-legal approach, this chapter proposes an alternative hypothesis, arguing that the legal process acted in a different social capacity in each of the abortion debates, thus generating diverging effects on the regulation of abortion in the USA and Western Europe. This chapter gives a brief survey of abortion politics in the USA as evolving into a perpetual tug-of-war dynamics between competing moral views, survey of the legal developments in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium, uncovering a contrasting dynamics where the once bitterly-fought abortion controversies. Drawing on these surveys, an analysis of the diverging role of the legal process in each of these debates and the implications of this divergence for legal resolutions of socio-cultural conflicts. The US Supreme Court's construction of the woman's right to choose steered abortion politics in the classical liberal direction, entrenching the discourse of fundamental rights as the principal paradigm for the American debate.
