| Abstrakt: |
Authors discuss the context, implications, and major challenges of implementing the Croatian Constitutional Court's historic 2017 „Abortion decision“. Twenty-six years after it was originally challenged, the socialist era abortion-enabling 1978 law withstood the test of constitutionality against a new constitutional and value order introduced by the 1990 Croatian constitution. This preservation and constitutionalization of the periodic abortion model drew on a systemic and teleological interpretation of constitutional guarantees of the rule of law (regarding contestation of the law’s formal constitutionality, seeing as it predated the new Constitution), equality, freedom and personhood, protection of dignity, privacy, family life, and freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. It thus authoritatively protected a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy on demand, while simultaneously relegating to the Parliament the option of exactly pinpointing the start of „life “and underlining the necessity of modernizing this almost 50-years-old piece of legislation. However, such a parliamentary mandate to complete the constitutional architecture of the right to freely decide on childbirth comes with a few issues and potential problems. This paper thus intends to highlight the major challenges in implementing the Court's decision, the foremost among them: issue of conscientious appeal. The authors discuss the remit of this phenomenon, identifying its „hard limits “and expounding on limitations and conditions that will have to accompany its future regulation. The potential abuse of power inherent in the right to conscientious appeal and its potential to impose a health practitioner's private opinion on other citizens and thus disable access to a legal health service will, the authors hold, be a true litmus-paper of the future abortion legislation's constitutionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
