"On 22 January 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court substantially curtailed the power of the American states to prohibit or limit the right of a woman to procure an abortion.' On 25 February 1975, the West German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the German Parliament, by permitting abortions within the first three months of pregnancy, violated the constitutional rights of unborn children. These decisions provide us with an uncommon opportunity to compare the constitutional law of different nations on abortion. That the highest tribunals of two robust constitutional democracies and secular political cultures should decide differently the question of the unborn child's right to life under the constitutions of their respective countries must excite curiosity, no matter one's stand or stake in the abortion controversy. This article seeks to restate and assess the reasoning in support of the doctrinal results in the German and American cases and then to relate those results to the legal cultures and constitutional values of the two countries. Yet we cannot wholly separate the two decisions from their political contexts or from the debate, intense in both countries, about the role of the judiciary in their respective systems of government. In both countries the very propriety of judicial intervention in the policy-making process on abortion has been severely deplored. In fact, the issue of the judiciary's role in the making of abortion policy received considerable stress by the dissenting justices of both tribunals. Thus we cannot afford to ignore the issue here."