Women and the Fourteenth Amendment

Justice Samuel Alito says that abortion was never mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. Neither was slavery, until the thirteenth amendment abolished it. Neither was marriage between persons of different ethnicities. Neither were women. Yet the spirit of the nation was moving toward abolishing slavery, allowing marriage between different races and including women as equal partners in government. Not immediately, of course--the term "all men are created equal" didn't include  anyone who wasn't a white guy, usually a property-owning Protestant white guy. But those guys had more than an inkling that slavery was bad--see early drafts of the Declaration: https://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/compare.html. Note the stuff in the first and second drafts regarding slavery didn't make it into the final version, the reason being that the writers didn't want to abandon a large source of their wealth. But like Saint Augustine they wanted to be good--just "not yet."

Even if these guys hadn't already been considering the evils of slavery and other injustices, they were hearing about these things from underlings--like their wives. Abigail Adams told her husband, John, the second president of the United States, “Well I suppose we will have to have to have a new code of laws and when you write those laws, remember the ladies, because all men would be tyrants if they could.” Against slavery, in favor of universal public education for girls as well as boys, she made it known that women should be allowed to hold political office. 

When Alito claims that rights must be"deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition," and that the "right to abortion does not fall within this category," he's wrong. The country was always moving toward rights to privacy regarding one's own (male) body. If it hadn't been, we'd have had a constitutional amendment banning or permitting vasectomy. 

No one is arguing in favor of a slaughter of innocents or defending abortion as a contraceptive method.  Jill Lepore refers to the procedure as "morally thorny," a position I suspect we all take. When it comes to the crunch--when a woman's physical or mental health is threatened, when the pregnancy results from rape or incest, when the fetus is not viable but has a heartbeat at 20 or 30 weeks, it's cruel to ban abortion. 

It's up to women to define their physical and mental health needs; their privacy in making these decisions would be unquestioned if they were men.