| | For me, the right to privacy is best addressed via the 9th amendment, as Professor Machan states. The reason being that the very nature of our constitutionally limited government is to be understood as the government having no powers but those specifically given to it. But there are some legitimate complaints with the way the supreme court decisions have upheld the right to privacy - by stating that there is a penumbra (ghostly eminence) that can be inferred from other amendments and that penumbra supports a right to privacy.
In Griswald v Connecticut, the state statute in question was: Any person who uses any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception shall be fined not less than fifty dollars or imprisoned not less than sixty days nor more than one year or be both fined and imprisoned. The majority opinion of William Douglas contained this: "[S]pecific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance." He gave examples, such as saying that the prohibition of quartering soldiers in any house created a zone of privacy - the house. This inferring of rights from explictly ennumerated rights has been used to 'create' rights and that makes the constitution subject to entirely malleable interpretations.
On the other hand, Stewart, in a dissenting opinion, found no enumeration of a right to privacy in the constitution - never mentioning the ninth amendment.
Thus we had one side saying we had rights that could be 'created' out of emanations, and the other side saying that we didn't have any rights except the ones explicitly enumerated.
Many conservatives hate the 'creation' of a privacy right because it is the foundation for Roe v Wade... and in their religous zeal to overturn Roe v Wade they would be very happy to eliminate any right to privacy - no matter how it is derived or explained. They want the government to have the power to prohibit abortions, or, for some, even to prohibit contraception as the Connecticut law did.
Of course, the proper approach would be to ask not where is the right of privacy located, but rather where would the government derives a just power from the constitution to violate a privacy, and then to refer to the ninth amendment to stop the expansion of government power (which Justice Goldberg did in a concurring opinion).
The only complication here is determining which powers can be constitutionally restricted for the federal government yet permitted to the states, versus those powers that can't be exercised by federal or state governments.
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