I wished that a younger sister of mine had not become a single parent at a young age. Not nearly long enough after that, I wished that she had not become pregnant for the second time, and/or wished that she had planned for the pregnancy/the pregnancy had fit her plans.
As fate would have it, I was the only person she knew at that time who had enough extra money on hand to be able to foot the bill for an abortion. I never wished, though, that she had not asked me for help. She decided. She asked. I paid (and drove, etc.). If that sort of thing can ever be routine, this was.
But, hey, the Seventies were a period maybe more of experimentation than reflection. On the other hand, there's something to be said for being able to make choices when faced with a variety of challenges. And I really hope that a family in that same position today never has to face a worse set of choices than my sister and I had available.
There are those, even on the left, who read the Opinions of the Roberts Court and come away less pessimistic than I do. Maybe they see the cases on The Second Amendment and devine a broad and deep seated commitment to all concepts of personal liberty. For me, I'd like to go there, but can't. Part of it goes back to Bork. And part of it goes even further back to early Rhenquist. Etc. So when I see Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, and Alito in action I tend to connect dots, and I can't help but see the pursuit of an established agenda. That and the fact that the right wing has become all the more vocal, and all the more successful over time in its concerted attack on our "penumbra" of privacy. Because you can't argue against the fact that The Founding Fathers failed us (understandably so, but nonetheless) on that one.
You went to elementary school in the fifties you learned to love the country, but one of the things we all learned to love the most about it was our "Right to Privacy". And when The Warren Court brought that "Right" to life during our formative years, there just was no inclination to question the means used to get there. There just was, what felt like, justifiably righteous celebration.
And now that whole experience is labeled as little more than a sham. "There is no right of privacy in the constitution", they say. And a reading of the literal text says that there is just some mere literal legitimacy in the point.
So, yes, there is no right to privacy in the constitution of the right wing, as there is none in their hearts or in their minds.
As for the left, in our Constitution there is a Right to Privacy, as there always has been, and as there always must be. Because for the federal government to be shrunk to a size small enough to be drowned in a bathtub, The Constitution must be shrunk even smaller.
But, hey, we lost the first battle. Or nearly so, because there is nearly in place (and probably irreversibly so) the machinery to take us, "Strict Constructionistically", back to the original language, if not even nearly "The Original Intent", of The Founders. And it's not hysterical to say that we could arrive back there at nearly any moment.
And then the question becomes, having virtually lost the first "battle", do we or do we not still want to win the "war". Because that could very easily slip away also.
If and when whatever document we are then using as our controlling verison of The U.S. Constitution provides unequivocably for the supremacy of citizens over government in the clearly private parts of our lives, then, and only then, we will have won this particular battle over the virulent right wing hosts attacking us.
The Second U.S. Constitutional Convention!