PRIVACY AND ABORTION….Adam Serwer takes on Sarah Palin’s apparent view that you can be pro-life even though there’s an inherent right to privacy in the constitution:
In my view, if there’s a constitutional right to privacy, you can’t take away someone’s right to have an abortion, anymore than you can take away someone’s right to bear arms.
In fairness, I really don’t think this is true. The Fourth Amendment protects you against the police busting into your home without a warrant, but that doesn’t mean it’s OK to murder your kids as long as you do it in your living room. If Roe v. Wade were overturned, states could almost certainly declare that human life begins at conception and then outlaw abortion as murder regardless of any constitutional or statutory doctrine on privacy.
This would cause plenty of other problems for conservatives, of course, who are loathe to actually follow through on their belief that abortion is murder (Palin herself, for example, has been explicit that she doesn’t think abortion should be criminalized). But I don’t think privacy doctrine by itself would be conclusive one way or the other.