Many Conservatives and Evangelical Christians have argued for decades that abortion cannot be a Constitutional right, since the word “abortion” is never mentioned in the Constitution.  But this argument is absolutely false.

The Supreme Court has a long and established history of finding new constitutional rights, expanding the meaning of others, and adding rights, principles and words that do not even appear in the document! The Court has long used their authority to create Constitutional Rights to make profound changes in our law and society.

For example, the word “Privacy” never appears anywhere in the Constitution, yet the United States Supreme Court found that we do indeed have a Constitutional Right to Privacy, in Griswold v. Conn. (1965). This was a case where the Court decided that citizens have a Constitutionally protected Right to purchase and use birth control drugs and devices.

This Right to Privacy (Griswold, 1965), was expanded by the Court, eight years later, in Roe v. Wade (1973), to include a Constitutional Right to abortion. The Court said that not only does the Right to Privacy, established in Griswold, protect a woman’s right to decide to not get pregnant, it also protects her right, with some restrictions, to decide to terminate a fetus, when she does get pregnant.

The Right to an Attorney in a State Criminal trial is not mentioned in the Constitution, yet the Court found this Right for all of us, in 1963, in Gideon v. Wainwright. (Note: 98% of criminal trials are held in State Courts. The words in the Constitution specifically limit our right to an attorney to only these very few criminal trials that are held in Federal Courts.)  

Our Constitutional Right to Travel (traveling from one State to another), is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution, but dates back to at least 1858 (Paul v. Virginia).  And the fact that it does not matter that he actual words “Right to Travel” do not appear in the Constitution is highlighted in a recent case where the Supreme Court said: “For the purposes of this case, we need not identify the source of the Right to Travel in the text of the Constitution.” (Saenz v. Roe, 1999).

The Constitutional Right to marry a person of a different Race or Color is certainly not mentioned in the Constitution, yet this Constitutional Right (for example, for a Black person and a White person to wed), was determined to exist by the Court, in the wonderfully named case of Loving v. Virginia (1967). (By the way, the basic Right to Marry, is itself never mentioned in the Constitution, but, long, long ago the Court said that our Right to Marry is Constitutionally protected!) 

The Constitutional Right for us to be protected by the Fourth Amendment against the Government wiretapping our telephones or other electronic devices, was found for the first time in Katz v. United States, (1967).  Even though the words “telephones” and “wires” and other electronic surveillance terminology are obviously never mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, the Court extended the meaning of the Fourth Amendment to include protection for us against technological surveillance by the Government.

And in Obergefell v. Hodges, (2015), the Supreme Court found that the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the Constitution, along with the Fourteenth Amendment, ensure that same-sex couples have the same fundamental Constitutional right to marry as opposite-sex couples do.

There are many, many more examples of the Court interpreting the Constitution to expand the meaning of the actual words contained within it. In fact, there are entire books written about the history of the United States Supreme Court creating new rights and principles in our Constitution.