Reply #54: Or, loaning out one's car for a quick hop down to Mexico... [View All]

[SteveM]

That's what I did pre-Roe for a friend who faced an unwanted pregnancy.

Hard to say about health care being a Constitutional (or "natural" right). The Preamble to the Constitution contains "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure... provide... promote the general welfare, and secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution..." These verbs seem to provide a quality of action. "Ensure domestic tranquility" seems extremely obligatory; a duty of the people and its writ; "Provide for the common defense", strangely, allows "common defense" without proscription and command; "Promote the general welfare" is a fairly unique "positive" notion within a "negatively" -couched Bill of Rights within the Constitution (an old criticism by many of the "New Left).

One can loosely read the Preamble as "requiring" a positive, tangible action toward "general welfare;" and general welfare can be loosely read as charging the People, through the Constitution, to accomplish something like guaranteed health care. Perhaps Justice Douglas would have been as swashbuckling about this, and I liked Douglas, but I'm not sure on whether or not the Preamble is fair game in a discussion like this. But "...promote the general welfare" is a powerful positive charge standing out, as it were, from a negativist document.