Off the top of my head, I can think of two important unalienable rights that would fall under the Ninth Amendment’s rubric: the right of free political association, and parental rights. Neither is a right that is enumerated in our Constitution, but I for one won’t willingly give up either one.
My understanding is that the Ninth Amendment rose out of the fear among many of the framers, including Madison, that if you wrote a Bill of Rights and began enumerating rights that someone would then assume that just because a right was not enumerated it does not exist.
When they then lost the political argument over whether or not to include a Bill of Rights, the Ninth Amendment was their compromise.
Of course, it is routinely ignored.
I often encounter a particular case of this is various debates over the protection of innocent human life. My detractors claim, falsely, that the Constitution doesn’t explicitly protect the child in the womb from being aborted. So I have to tell them that even if they were correct, which they aren’t - the Fifth and the Fourteenth Amendments explicitly protect every PERSON - the Ninth Amendment explicitly forbids their position from being taken constitutionally.
Excellent comments.
Our Framers were correct in their fear that if some rights were enumerated, others would be excluded.