The Constitutional Right to Privacy

From the New Yorker Online: Since Ronald Reagan, Republican Presidents (and Presidential nominees) have been committed to overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s abortion-rights landmark from 1973. But as the debates last weekend in New Hampshire suggested, the G.O.P. appears to have taken a more extreme step in terms of rolling back the Constitutional right to privacy... Read the full article here.

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The "right to privacy," "unenumerated rights," and similar terms have become so associated with the right to obtain an abortion that many members of the GOP have begun to have a knee-jerk opposition to these rights and precedents.

But unenumerated rights, including a right to privacy, secure much more than the right to obtain an abortion. They secure the right to vote, to control the upbringing of one's children (by sending them to religious school or schools that teach foreign languages, for instance), the right to use contraception, and the right of consenting adults to engage in sexual activity.

It's one thing to sincerely believe that abortion is murder, but it is another thing entirely to reject constitutional protection of this entire list of freedoms.

-- Gowri Ramachandran, Constitutional Law Professor