But BOTH the arguments you just posted are equally “faulty" constitutionally speaking ..
And
Yeah the constitution doesn’t explicitly use the words “right to privacy” or “abortion” in the 14th Amendment. But then it doesn’t in article 1 either there is no “Congress should pass no laws regarding abortion or other healthcare issues, that should be left up to the states” clause. Sure you can choose to interpret it that way but that’s just as “faulty” interpreting the 14th amendment to include a right to privacy.
I first want to say I genuinely appreciate hearing your perspective on this, even if I don’t agree with it.
I think the right to abortion falls more broadly into the right to bodily autonomy. Do you think the right to bodily autonomy should not be a human right, and why not?
That’s the fundamental crux of the abortion issue. Pro-life advocates feel that the right to life of an unborn child must take precedence over the mother’s right to bodily autonomy.
And I believe it’s not a human right. I’ll go even further to say I believe it is essentially infanticide and should be illegal (in my state). But this thread isn’t about whether abortion should be legal or illegal, so I’ll stop right there.
Do you think the right to bodily autonomy should not be a human right, and why not?
I am interpreting this to mean she believes having an abortion should be a human right due to “bodily autonomy.” If this is correct, then it means I believe the opposite; I do not believe having an abortion is a human right. But perhaps my interpretation is incorrect. And again, we’re off-topic here.
I think for myself I would flip that around. The right to bodily autonomy is a human right and therefore abortion would naturally fall into scope. As would the right to not be experimented on without your consent, raped or enslaved, forced to take medication, forced to donate an organ, or anything else.
This feels relevant to whether or not it falls into the domain of state’s rights. But if the OP disagrees I’ll respect that.
Except that the revanchist post-Reconstruction Supreme Court rulings that gutted the 14th Amendment’s privileges and immunities clause still stand as precedents; the 14th is no longer a blanket authority for the Federal government to secure liberties to the People. Instead, the narrower and more demanding standard of Due Process has to be applicable.
ETA: now I catch up to the multiple warnings about relevancy to the OP. Mods please forward to the new thread.
Bodily autonomy must be absolute. For men and women. Anything else is reproductive slavery. Women are not “vessels” whose only function and worth is their ability to provide children. This country is quickly reverting to that sickening reality.
Sometimes, unenumerated rights are protected incident to a primary, enumerated right. For example, due to Article IV, a citizen of Vermont has a federal right to apply for the New Hampshire bar (to practice law in that state) on the same terms as residents of New Hampshire. Supreme Court of N.H. v. Piper, 470 U.S. 274 (1985). But I do not think the Ninth Amendment provides any independent protection of rights.
I don’t think a law banning medical procedures violates the right to bodily autonomy. I suspect we have a fundamental disagreement as to what bodily autonomy means.
I would distinguish between bans and (directly) regulating women’s bodies. But letting states decide whether to ban or allow abortion care is implied by the Tenth Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Where it says “to the States respectively, or to the people”, the distiction is left to state law, so far as the federal government is concerned.
I agree with LSLGuy. There’s nothing objectively faulty with arguing abortion should be protected at the federal level, provided the right process is followed to reach that objective. I think Alaska, for example, protects privacy in a state constitutional amendment, and has construed that amendment to protect the right to abortion access. I don’t see anything objectively wrong with someone who wants the same at the federal level.
Even if the “moral standards about everything” that @LSLGuy mentions are things that the population votes on (i.e., referendums), and/or are implemented by their directly, democratically-elected officials? Those are, fundamentally, the core of “democratic values,” AFAIK. A majority of the community’s voters chose these things, and chose to control morals in their community through legislation.
Such a community might be obnoxious and intolerant, but I’m not seeing how they are not “democratic.”
I think the Supreme Court’s expansion of the commerce clause and 14th Amendment in the '60s contributed to this significantly. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment, prohibiting poll taxes, was really the end of an era. It was a huge waste of political capital if the Supreme Court could re-interpret the Constitution to find poll taxes unconstitutional anyways–which it did, two years later, in 1966. And it’s a problem now that the ideology of the court has shifted, and the civil rights act of 1964 is under fire.
Regardless, the net of it’s the same: the standard response to people who disagree with narrow interpretations of the Constitution, or want a right enshrined, is “well, then, get an amendment passed”…but that simply doesn’t happen anymore.
I think the right to bodily autonomy is a human right. And furthermore, I think laws that criminalizes self-managed abortions implicate that human right. So do laws that criminalize suicide.
Laws criminalizing assisted suicide and provision of abortions, however, do not.
I also think nobody should attempt self-managed abortion, or suicide.
Oh, and like all other human rights based on dignity, the boundaries of the right are sensitive to context. People are unique and rights only exist with reference to social context. Dignity for a child looks very different than dignity for an adult in the prime of life, which looks different than dignity for an elder. And even at the same age, dignity in one culture looks different than dignity in another.