Five of the Riley justices are still on the court. Of the four that aren’t, there’s two that seem stronger on privacy than his or her predecessor (Gorsuch, KBJ), one that seems like a wash (Kavanaugh), and maybe one that’s less strong on privacy (Barrett).
You can point to Roe and Chevron, but those didn’t come out of nowhere. The first, conservatives vowed to overturn 50 years ago—and its expansive notion of judicially declaring rights is not embraced even among liberals on the court today. The second was a judge created interpretive doctrine anyway, and proved unworkable over time. But it also didn’t come out of nowhere. Gorsuch has been writing about it since before I was in law school, and that was 15 years ago.
Roe v Wade was based on the right to privacy. The Supreme Court ruling that overturned it eliminated our right to privacy. Then they invalidated Roe v Wade as a corollary.
Since the current court eliminated the right to privacy in the US, I doubt they’ll spontaneously decide to restore it.
Roe wasn’t about a right to “privacy.” The right to privacy comes from the fourth amendment:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…
If Roe was about “privacy”—i.e. laws against abortion are a “search” of your “person,” then by the same logic—laws against drowning your infant in the bathtub constitute a “search” of your “house.”
Dobbs didn’t get rid of the right to privacy. It’s still there in the fourth amendment. It simply dropped the pretense that abortion was about privacy (which Casey had already done).
Wrong on your first point - Privacy right is not based on the 4th amendment but rather on the 9th amendment (unenumerated rights are persevered to the people).
Correct on your second point - Dobbs didn't take any rights away, it merely delegated to the States, where historically, such rights such rights are granted.
A right can’t be “based” on the 9th amendment. The 9th amendment just says the bill of rights isn’t an exhaustive enumeration. It can’t be the source of rights—the rights must come from somewhere else.
I don’t think this is right. It reads backwards to me. Didn’t Roe, controversially, hold that abortion was protected as a function of constitutional protections related to privacy (in the due process clause of the 14th amendment—specifically as one form of the “liberty” you can’t be “deprived of” without “due process of law”)? Then attempted to explain in medically specific terms when exactly your pregnancy crosses over from being a matter of liberty/personal privacy into a matter that can be regulated or prohibited?
Then didn’t Dobbs basically work by undoing the idea that you can locate abortion rights in the due process clause, rather than somehow wrecking the constitutional amendment itself?
Roe purports to be about privacy. But it’s really about the second point you list, which is purporting to define when a fetus becomes sufficiently developed to warrant protection from the state. After all, nothing changes between conception and the day before birth from the point of view of privacy. Or heck, even the day after birth—you have a privacy right in your home, not only your person. So the “privacy” right isn’t holding up any weight. All the work is being done by the moral determination that a fetus in the first two trimesters isn’t sufficiently developed to warrant legal protection. Once you assert that killing an 8 week fetus is no different than having a body part removed, the work being done by privacy is trivial.
That latter question has nothing to do with privacy or the constitution. It’s a general moral judgment based on underlying biological facts. In that respect, Roe simply is an articulation of Harry Blackmun’s Methodist religious beliefs. The United Methodist Church came out strongly in favor of abortion legality in the 1960s. But there’s nothing in the constitution supporting the determination Roe reached and Roe didn’t even pretend there was.
There is a legal subtlety here that's often misunderstood (or misrepresented) by most pro-abortionists:
The right to privacy was curved out of the 9th Amendment in the district court decision (not the 4th or the 14th).
The Supreme court upheld the district court decision and went further by adding the protection of the 14th amendment as to how and when this privacy right can be abridged by the states (not without due process of law).
States must show a compelling interest to intervene in women's decision to abort, and this compelling interest ripens only after the first trimester of pregnancy.
You can point to Roe and Chevron, but those didn’t come out of nowhere. The first, conservatives vowed to overturn 50 years ago—and its expansive notion of judicially declaring rights is not embraced even among liberals on the court today. The second was a judge created interpretive doctrine anyway, and proved unworkable over time. But it also didn’t come out of nowhere. Gorsuch has been writing about it since before I was in law school, and that was 15 years ago.