The European Court has had a great influence on strengthening the human rights for women in healthcare today. Going back in time. The Court's early engagement came through abortion, the most politically charged area of women's health. Its strategy was to avoid the substantive question of whether a right to abortion exists and to focus instead on whether states keep their own promises. In Tysiąc v Poland (2007), a woman with severe myopia was refused a therapeutic abortion despite warnings that pregnancy would damage her sight. Polish law permitted the procedure, but she had no effective way to challenge the doctors' refusal. In A, B and C v Ireland (2010), the Grand Chamber declined to find a right to abortion. It did, however, find a violation for the applicant who could not establish whether her life-threatening condition made her eligible for a lawful termination.
R.R. v Poland (2011) and P. and S. v Poland (2012) pushed further. Delays and obstruction in accessing prenatal testing and lawful abortion were found to reach the threshold of degrading treatment under Article 3. The principle was clear: where the law grants an entitlement, it must be practically accessible. That logic carried through to M.L. v Poland (2023), after Poland narrowed its abortion law.
Childbirth and the right to choose
A second strand opened with Ternovszky v Hungary (2010). Anna Ternovszky wanted to give birth at home, but Hungarian law left midwives who assisted home births at risk of sanction. The Court held that the right to choose the circumstances of giving birth falls within private life, and that legal uncertainty about it breached Article 8.
The promise of Ternovszky was soon tempered. In Dubská and Krejzová v Czech Republic (2016), the Grand Chamber accepted that Czech restrictions on assisted home birth interfered with women's private lives. It nonetheless found no violation, giving states a wide margin of appreciation in matters of healthcare policy and resources. Pojatina v Croatia(2018) and Kosaitė-Čypienė and Others v Lithuania (2019) followed the same line.
The childbirth cases therefore leave an uneasy settlement. Birth is recognised as an intimate exercise of autonomy, yet states keep broad discretion over the options actually available. Konovalova and Hanzelkovi v Czech Republic (2014), where a newborn was removed after the mother left hospital early, show the Court is firmer where consent and family life are directly overridden.
Coercion, discrimination and who is believed
Some of the Court's strongest judgments concern women whose consent was treated as unimportant because of who they were. In V.C. v Slovakia (2011), a young Roma woman was sterilised during a caesarean after being asked to sign a form while in labour. The Court found violations of Articles 3 and 8, and similar cases followed. In G.M. and Others v Moldova (2022), women with intellectual disabilities in a psychiatric institution were subjected to abortions and contraception without consent, again breaching Article 3.
Carvalho Pinto de Sousa Morais v Portugal (2017) took the analysis into the courtroom itself. A Portuguese court had reduced a woman's compensation for gynaecological surgical negligence, reasoning that sexuality mattered less at 50 and as a mother of two. Strasbourg found this to be discrimination based on gender and age stereotypes.
These cases show that violations in healthcare rarely fall evenly. Ethnicity, disability, age and poverty shape whose bodily autonomy is respected, and the Court has begun, if cautiously, to name that.
From restraint to positive duties
The Convention was built around stopping states from doing harm. Increasingly, the Court asks what states must do. In Mehmet Şentürk and Bekir Şentürk v Turkey (2013), a pregnant woman died after a hospital refused emergency treatment because she could not pay, breaching the right to life. Elena Cojocaru v Romania (2016) found a violation where delays between hospitals led to the deaths of a mother and her baby.
The domestic violence line, from Opuz v Turkey (2009) to Kurt v Austria (2021), established duties to assess risk and protect women before harm escalates. Most strikingly, in Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz v Switzerland (2024), the Grand Chamber accepted that inadequate climate action breached the Article 8 rights of an association of older women concerned for their health. Women's health has become a site where the Court tests the outer reach of state responsibility.
Broader questions for Convention rights
Taken together, these cases raise questions that reach beyond healthcare. The first is the margin of appreciation. The Court is willing to insist on procedure, consent and non-discrimination, but it often retreats when a case touches resources, morality or clinical policy. That leaves women's substantive choices dependent on where in Europe they live.
The second concerns the gap between judgment and practice. Several of the Slovak sterilisation cases came years after the events, and home birth remains restricted in states that won in Strasbourg. A right recognised in a judgment does not automatically change how a midwife, doctor or hospital administrator behaves.
The third is about whose experience counts. The strongest judgments are those where the Court listens closely to how women describe what happened to them, in labour, under sedation or in an institution. My own ethnographic research with mothers in Tanzania and the UK suggests that claiming rights in childbirth is rarely a single legal act. It is an ongoing negotiation, shaped by fear, trust, gossip and power.
The Strasbourg jurisprudence offers vital tools. Its next challenge is to ensure those tools reach the woman in the labour ward, not only the lawyer in the courtroom.