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Originally Posted by irishgrl
Jason, Im at work now or I'd spend more time responding to your posts. in a nutshell, the way I understand Roe is that the Court used the 14th amendment privacy language to include a womans right to autonomy over her own body and that it outweighed a State's compelling interest in the life of the unborn. I dont think we actually are disagreeing on the ruling, only on what we were previously discussing, which if you'll go back a few pages started with the origins of the Court's "privacy" finding. you are engaging in too many arguments if you think I am saying any more than that.
All I said was the court didnt make up its ruling out of whole cloth, it clarified (using case precedent I might add) the scope of "privacy".
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Yes, you are correct in the sense that the right to privacy was essentially established in Griswold (At issue in this case was a Connecticut law that, in an attempt to discourage married people from engaging in sex without the intention to procreate, criminalized the provision of counselling, and other medical treatment, to married persons for purposes of preventing conception)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut - though in Griswold, the Court cited to no specific Constitutional lang. specifically outlining that right. The Court reasoned that according to precedent, the Bill of Rights guaranteed not only those rights which it specifically enumerated, but also unenumerated rights that were contained in the "penumbras" of the enumerated rights. So, Roe and Griswold are the same from that point of view.
But, my point is most scholars readily admit Roe greatly expanded that concept so that it really was not the same thing in that innocent parties were being harmed. In other words, Griswold did not use the right to privacy to jusitify the killing of a fetus, which many believe is a life once initially formed. That is a huge difference from mere contraception. Roe even recognizes this issue when Justice Blackmun refuses to define when life begins. Thus, Roe did recreate the right to privacy and vastly broaden it. Note - I make no comment on when life begins or anything like that. I am just saying that the Court in Roe recognized that the State had an intertest in protecting the fetus throughout the pregnancy, but the woman's right to privacy outweighed that state's right in the first trimester because the fetus was not viable outside of the mother.