A Brief Stab At The Correctness Of Roe V. Wade aka The Constitutional Right To An Abortion

 I’ll take a brief stab at this. I’ll confine myself to one’s appendix or tonsils. I can’t see the denial of substantive due process given the lines of reasoning starting with Brandeis’ dissent in Olmsted, adopted in Katz, continued in Griswold, thereafter in Roe and in Casey and further in effusively in Lawrence v Texas. 

These cases’ dicta converge generally on a capacious right of privacy as a necessary constituent of personal liberty and an anchor of liberty rights in the 5th and 14th Amendments. As Kennedy says in Lawrence, citing Douglas in Griswold:

“If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” 

As Douglas said in Griswold, and I think, it must be right, 

…. Nor is the right to study any particular subject or any foreign language. Yet the First Amendment has been construed to include certain of those rights. Without those peripheral rights, the specific rights would be less secure…

Given a capacious right of privacy as a necessary constituent of personal liberty, I can’t see how decision to have tonsils or one’s appendix removed isn’t but an instance of such a privacy right, how it doesn’t fit within the rationale evinced by the dicta that all go to establish the right. 

My surmise, substitute removing tonsils for abortion, and it would be hard for me to see any controversy in the assertion of it as a incident of one’s constitutionally protected privacy right.