I mean the german Constitutional Court abortion rulling was rather weird. It rulled that the state was obligated to protect life from the moment of conception but only imposed a mandatory counselling period.
Oh, it's even more weird than you think, because the mandatory counseling period was already in the law that was struck down. What this ruling said was, that abortion must be a felony in principle to save the unborn life, but it can be unpunishable in certain circumstances. That's, in essence, the law of the land. Of course, in practice there is no big difference between "legal" and "unpunishable". It probably paves a way for things like the possibility of the §219a that has been abolished now.
Judicial activism clearly isn't unheard of the German Constitutional Court. On the other hand, judicary review of laws after the example of the US Supreme Court is one of its basic tasks laid down in the German Constitution.
On the other hand, as you can especially see their ruling on abortion in 1993 and in their rulings on European integration the judges oft the German Constitutional Court seem to care about the effects of their rulings as they mix some bold judicial assumptions and findings on principle with a tendency of watering down what action they actually want to see taken.
Germany attiude towards abortion seems weird to me, you have the CSU instructing schools in bavaria to devote a day to teach kids about the value of unborn life but somehow the tone remains pretty moderate.
There is nothing weird about it. Like in many European countries abortion seems to be a settled issue for the most people as of now. The fights on the issue have been fought in Western Germany in the seventies and there is no big appetite to fight them again. Then you have the East which followed the usual socialst policies of few abortion restrictions on the premise of women's equality and the integration of women to the workforce and a total roll back would have been taken very poorly in the East.
On the other hand, it would be interesting to see, weither the Constitutional Court would hold up their decision of 1992 towards a more liberal abortion law, but their doesn't seem to be appetite for testing that, either, when on practical terms the difference isn't big.
