 Avoiding the concept of privacy as such, Judith Thomson employed the concept of a right to control the use of one’s own body in a famous defense of abortion rights (Thomson 1971). The United States Supreme Court popularized privacy grounds for abortion rights when it held in Roe v Wade in 1973 that the constitutional right to privacy requires striking down laws criminalizing medically safe abortions. Advocates of a decisional privacy right to abortion maintain that government should not take sides in what is irreducibly a moral debate, and that individuals should be free to make up their own minds about the moral status of the unborn (Richards 1986).