Death by Privacy Emanations, penumbras, and bad law.

National Review Online ^ | March 14, 2005, 7:54 a.m. | Mark R. Levin

[wcdukenfield]

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is an excerpt from Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America. (Citations and other notes appear in the book, though not in this excerpt.)

”Our nationwide policy of abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy was neither voted for by our people nor enacted by our legislators — not a single state had such unrestricted abortion before the Supreme Court decreed it to be national policy in 1973.” — Ronald Reagan, 1983

Today, legalized abortion is the law of the land because the Supreme Court decided in 1973 that its recently created constitutional right to privacy also included a new constitutional right to abortion. If you look in the Constitution, however, you will find no general “right to privacy” any more than you will find a right to abortion — and for good reason: It’s not there. The framers assumed no general right to privacy because, to state the obvious, criminal and evil acts can be committed in privacy. Criminal codes are full of such examples — from murder to incest to rape and other crimes.

How Judges Make Law

The modern argument for a right to privacy began in 1961 in Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Poe v. Ullman. The case was brought by Planned Parenthood on behalf of a carefully selected group of people: a married couple, a single woman, and a Planned Parenthood obstetrician, C. Lee Buxton. Planned Parenthood’s suit was directed against a Connecticut law that prohibited the sale and use of contraceptives. The Supreme Court dismissed the case because the law had not been enforced against the people in Planned Parenthood’s case. It is a basic judicial principle that there has to be an actual legal dispute to be....

[Servant of the 9]

”Our nationwide policy of abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy was neither voted for by our people nor enacted by our legislators — not a single state had such unrestricted abortion before the Supreme Court decreed it to be national policy in 1973.” — Ronald Reagan, 1983

The Gipper was fudging the issue.

The 1973 ruling did not mandate abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy, though it was later expanded to that in other rulings.

Governor Ronald Reagan had already signed an abortion bill in California that was far more liberal than anything that would be required by Roe as it was originally construed.

Roe was a very bad decision, but let's not start revising history to suit our positions.

So9