"This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon the state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision on whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."
If you where going to base something like that on the 9th amendment you would have to allow people to pretty much do whatever they want.
The 9th amendment is "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." In other words it says just because the constitution says certain things are rights, that doesn't mean there are no other rights. I support the principle, but it makes no distinction between rights related to abortion and any other type of legal rights. I could have a right to drive, so they can't take away my license, or a right to own a machine gun (here you could also bring up the 2nd amendment), or the right to copy and distribute commercial software, or the right to not pay taxes... Obviously we don't have legal rights to do anything we might want to do. So what makes abortion so special? Nothing in the 9th amendment...
Tim |
