One more thing...

Let’s use your example for a minute. You say that Roe v. Wade was the right decision because it means your daughters can go to a safe, clean facility to end a pregnancy for reasons they do not have to divulge (thus, maintaining their right to privacy). Your daughters have this “individual right” to privacy because they are individual human beings, and the Constitution of the United States recognizes that they have these Rights, and acts as a protection for those Rights against limitation or infringement by the Government.

I maintain that your daughters are individuals because from the moment of THEIR conception, they had a unique, “one-in-a-trillion” DNA signature that means they are not a portion of another person (meaning the mother) but are separate beings, even if they must have someone else feed them, cloth them, monitor them, and provide for them for at least the first several years of their “individual” lives. No more fundamental definition of individuality can exist than the very DNA that defines us.

How, then, can we separate the individual nature of the “mother” of a child, but not the individual nature of the child itself, or the father (who needed to be involved or this wouldn’t be an issue at all). Why does a mother’s right to end the pregnancy supersede the right of the child, simply because the child cannot survive without the mother? The child’s rights are recognized once the child is born, and the rights of the child are seen to exist in the case of violence or murder against a pregnant woman (thus, the double-murder charge in the Lacey Peterson case), but when the question is between the woman’s right to end the pregnancy and the right of the child to have a chance to live a normal productive life, the woman’s right ALWAYS supersede the child’s.

IF (and this is a big IF) Texas, or any State, prior to Roe had, indeed, been violating a woman’s right to privacy, then it was the “obligation” of the Court to rule in favor of the plaintiff. It would then, however, have been the “responsibility” of the Court to define the means in which the “rights” of the child were to be seen as viably protected by the Constitution… but this wasn’t the case. Nor was it the case that a FATHER’S rights were defined in regard to this issue.

The First Amendment guarantees the right of the individual to speak as he chooses, so long as his speech doesn’t limit or remove another person’s rights as defined by the Constitution. One cannot walk into a theater and yell “FIRE!” simply because one enjoys watching the panic and confusion of the resulting exodus… that is a violation of everyone else’s civil rights. As much as the Courts are intended to limit Government’s role in our lives, they also ensure that no individual’s exercise of their rights supersedes or infringes upon another’s. The Burger Court’s ruling in Roe may have satisfied the former criteria, but it failed miserably in the latter.