For a brief period - during the first half of the 1970s - it appeared as though the fundamental debate concerning the function of basic rights (to a certain extent an individual-oriented reprise of the Rechtsstaat-social state controversy of the 1950s and 1960s was coming down to the alternatives “Basic Rights: (only) Defensive Rights” or “Basic Rights: (also) Rights to Participation and Claims to Performance” Peter Häberle's demand (made at the 1971 Constitutional Law Teachers' Conference) that the base-line substantive legal status of basic rights be supplemented by a “status activus processualis” (in the sense of a “government-performative due process”), and the Federal Constitutional Court's (FCC's) first Numerus-Clausus decision (of 18 July 1972) and its Term Abortion decision (of 25 February 1975), with its recognition of the state's “comprehensive” duty to protect (and promote!) unborn life, all mark advanced positions in theory and judicial decision-making. At the same time, new life was given to the discussion concerning “basic social rights” (such as the “right to work”, “to shelter”, “to education”, “to social security”, etc.), and new and expanded forms of social protection, in short: concerning the concretization of the social state principle. Yet the welfare-state, “social-liberal” reform impulse soon ran up against political-economic limits: the “feasibility proviso” allowed the merely “ideal standard” character of subjective performance rights to become all too quickly apparent.