Does anyone deny that we have a constitutional right to bodily autonomy, or does anyone feel that we shouldn't have this right?
I absolutely do feel that bodily autonomy is and ought to be an inalienable human right and understand that right to be codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
I am not convinced that 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" guarantees that Right to Privacy that the Supreme Court upheld in cases like Griswold, Lawrence, Eisenstadt, and until Jun 24th Roe. I am glad the Supreme Court made those findings and discovered a Right to Privacy, I'm just skeptical that the language of the Fourth Amendment really implies bodily autonomy or a Right to Privacy in a modern sense.
My read of history is that the founders naturally accorded themselves and their fellow patriarchs an expectation of family and sexual privacy that they did not extend to the women, servants, slaves, children subject to their patriarchy and, as exclusive beneficiaries, probably felt no necessity to protect constitutionally a security the founders already possessed socially. It is not clear to me that preventing the Federal govt from violating my personal security means the same thing as our modern expectation of a Right to Privacy. We can say with confidence that the Founders considered abortion and family planning the jurisdiction of the patriarch and the midwife and certainly not a public concern.
I also believe We the People are charged by the founders and the Constitution with forming a more perfect Union in every generation and amending our Constitution to address our more perfect understanding of human equality and enfranchisement.
I think that there should be an Amendment to the Constitution that explicates a Right to Privacy to an extent that makes Federal restrictions on family planning, health decisions, euthanasia, drug use, etc. impossible as well as corporate intrusions now commonplace such as phone tracking, all visual and audio monitoring like Echo devices and iPhone image collating. To the extent that our day to day business has become a valuable commodity to commerce, we possess a self-evident right to sell or refuse to sell that data as we see fit and need to claw this right away from Amazon, Google, Apple, etc. post haste.
So I guess I do deny that there is now an obvious and explicit constitutional right to bodily autonomy. I personally benefitted from the inferences of earlier courts and was fine with enjoying the benefits of that interpretation but now seeing how leaving the question to interpretation exposes us and our descendants to further disenfranchisement, I believe that human right to bodily autonomy is self-evident, necessary, and appropriate to enshrine in our Constitution.
