When news broke on June 24th that the U.S. Supreme Court had officially reversed Roe v. Wade, declaring that the constitutional right to abortion no longer exists, privacy advocates almost immediately began to ring alarm bells.
The right to an abortion and a right to privacy may seem like disparate freedoms, but the right to abortion access, according to the original 1973 Roe ruling, is based on a right to privacy guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause, privacy advocates argue. The concern is that the decision could now have wider-reaching impacts for other kinds of privacy that Americans consider to be a basic right.
