Reproductive rights and the potential to make reproductive decisions have always been contested. This volume investigates how reproductive decision-making was negotiated in Western societies. Since the 1960s, modern means of contraception increased women’s options. Access to legal abortion, the spread of reproductive knowledge through the women’s health movements since the 1970s, and progress of assisted reproductive technologies since the 1980s heightened the question of who could or should make reproductive decisions and who was denied them. This special issue follows a transnational approach. Focusing on the development of family planning in West Germany and on conflicts over abortion in the United States, the volume also analyses the influence of the Catholic Church and nationalism in Ireland and that of social democratic welfare policies in Sweden. In addition, a focus on transnational abortion travels allows us to offer a panorama of how women’s capacities to make reproductive decisions were debated and challenged after 1945 and how women sought to control their reproduction even in the face of legal hurdles. Investigating reproductive decision-making allows us to conceive of women not just as passive victims or subjects of family and gender policies, but as agents in the process of historical change.