The End of the Right to Privacy

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

50% : But neither does the right of same-sex couples to sexual intimacy, upheld by the Court in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas, or their right to marry, upheld in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges.
45% : Indeed, on pages 31-32 of his draft opinion, Alito vigorously criticizes prior Supreme Court precedent involving interracial marriage, the right to contraception, the right to engage in private, consensual sexual acts, the right to same-sex marriage, and other unenumerated rights.
44% : The legal logic of Alito's opinion threatens all constitutional protections of privacy rights, including Supreme Court precedents on the right to use contraception, and for LGBTQ or interracial couples to marry, and even for consenting adults to have same-sex intercourse.
44% : The right to abortion does not fall within this category."
42% : "Roe's defenders characterize the abortion right as similar to the rights recognized in past decisions involving matters such as intimate sexual relations, contraception, and marriage," Alito writes, "but abortion is fundamentally different, as both Roe and Casey acknowledged, because it destroys what those decisions called 'fetal life' and what the law now before us [the Mississippi abortion ban] describes as an 'unborn human being.'"To make this distinction, he must adopt the Mississippi legislature's fundamentalist Christian view that an unborn fetus is a "human being."
42% : Thus, under a strict originalist/textualist interpretation, since the right to privacy or abortion (or interracial or gay marriage) was not generally understood to exist when the Constitution (or even the post-Civil War amendments) were enacted, future Supreme Courts may not find them to be implied by general language like "liberty."
41% : The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision ..."Keep in mind that the text of the Constitution makes no mention of "privacy," "contraception," "marriage," and certainly not "homosexuality."
36% : So one should take little comfort that these precedents won't also be overturned by the Supreme Court under Alito's legal reasoning, despite his assurances later in his draft opinion that nothing in the opinion overturning the Roe precedent "should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion."
32% :Alito disingenuously tries to distinguish abortion from other rights which the Supreme Court has upheld under the 14th Amendment's protection of liberty.
31% : But even this attempt to distinguish abortion from other "unenumerated rights" that the Supreme Court has previously upheld is hard to square with the legal reasoning in the rest of Alito's draft opinion.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.