"8. Both in the US and abroad, constitutional courts had an important role in defining the permissible limits of legislative attempts to regulate abortion. In the US, a ‘nationwide movement of young lawyers’ sought to use the courts to secure a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion (Garrow (1999) 836–37). Because abortion was regulated at the state level in the United States, Roe v Wade and its companion, Doe v Bolton, ‘were only two of approximately fifteen to twenty roughly simultaneous cases’ percolating through the courts at the time. When the Supreme Court heard Roe v Wade and Doe v Bolton, approximately a dozen such cases were on its docket (ibid 836–37). Abroad, cases in Austria, France and Italy reached the constitutional courts of those nations in 1974, 1975, and 1975, respectively (Ernst et al 759–60; Siegel 357)."