From: Vin McLellan <vin@shore.net>
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 07:41:31 -0800 (PST)
To: "Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net>
Subject: Re: Constitution and a Right to Privacy
Message-ID: <199702181541.HAA06067@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>(And I always thought the "woman's right to privacy" argument for abortion
>was flaky. Accepting such an argument, wouldn't infanticide be equally
>protected by a woman's right to privacy?)
>
>--Tim May

	Whoa! This begs a thoughful response, but I don't have time right
now.  Might it suffice to suggest that a privacy claim -- a demand for
control over what concerns her, her alone, or (on balance) her more than
any other -- seems reasonable to extend to both contraception and early
abortion?  For many of us, by the same logic, and with the same moral
comfort.

	(As the clock slips onward, and the potential viability of the
fetus becomes more likely or certain, I personally believe the woman no
longer exists alone, and the privacy argument becomes conflicted and more
tenuous.   But Tim's golem, Infanticide, is a creature of nightmare --
wholly beyond the pale!)

	To my mind, any attempt to control what is done to the woman's body
(by her choice) while the prospective child is but a bit of enhanced
potential, much much less than a viable child, is an unconstitutional and
morally-invalid attempt by others (the state, the church, the country club)
to pre-empt her will, and prescribe or dictate a wholly new value system
for her.

	Any claim (by the father, the state, the church, etc.) to control
what happens in the moments or days after conception (say, forbidding
RU-whatever, the French drug,) has no more moral authority than any similar
claim to Higher Authority -- to safeguard the potential within her --
which is used to forbid his or her the use of a contraceptive, or which
requires him or her to take a drug which makes multiple pregnancies more
likely.

	I always thought the Jesuits had the logical argument straight.  If
the woman has no inherent right to control her destiny in the languid
aftermath of intercourse (just because she has within herself the potential
of a new life) then she has no claim to self-possession which allows her to
use a contraceptive just before intercourse.  If it is the potential for
new life that allows external authorities to overwhelm her judgment and
violate her privacy, then the case for that Papal Judgement exists before,
during, and after sex.

	Problem is: while logical, the Catholic argument seems silly,
authoritarian, and hopelessly abstract in the face of what many of us
experience as a less dogmatic and vastly more human context. A context in
which the right to privacy or self-possession seems inherent in the people
we are, the people we know, the world as we live it.  (Jesuits have a
certain disadvantage, from this POV;-)

	The fact that this claim of privacy or self-possession apparently
has an echo in the US Constitution (that oh, so-prescient document!) -- and
in the libertarian/liberal proclamations of numerous other nation states --
is a validation, a confirmation... but the Right of privacy, the Claim, is
inherent in our sense of who we are, and our sense of what an individual
is.

	If the philosophers had not considered it in their musings, we
would have to fight harder; we would need to define it as well as defend it
-- but it can only be denied if we denied ourselves, as the serfs of the
Dark Ages were expected to... and did.

	Women as vessels.  Men as vassals.

	Suerte,
		_Vin

         Vin McLellan + The Privacy Guild + <vin@shore.net>
      53 Nichols St., Chelsea, MA 02150 USA <617> 884-5548