ABSTRACT
Legal actions have been a prominent feature of the bitterly fought struggles over abortion in the Western World. Activists regularly turned to courts and legislatures in an attempt to entrench clashing moral views about women’s right to terminate pregnancies and the protection of unborn life. Among these struggles the US Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade (1973) 1 has often been heralded as one of the greatest legal victories for reproductive choice. 2 Declaring a judicially mandated constitutional right to abortion, this ruling stands in sharp contrast to Western European laws, which maintained a normative disapproval toward the termination of pregnancies that could go unpunished under specified circumstances. 3
