The real issue, from the legal philosophy standpoint, is whether abortion is a subject of federal constitutional law in the first place. Roe said that it is. The Constitution prohibits compelled witness against oneself, but does not say that confessions are automatically compelled without proof of a knowing waiver of rights. Perhaps the precursor to Roe in this philosophy in the context of women's issues and family privacy, however, was the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut . In Griswold , the Court for the first time found that the Constitution contained a general right of privacy, although privacy is not actually mentioned in the Constitution.
Various guarantees create zones of privacy.
The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen. The Fifth Amendment in its Self-Incrimination Clause enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment. This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation. Justice Blackmun went on, of course, to set the three different standards governing the government's ability to intervene in abortion decisions, based on the three trimesters of pregnancy.