"The Court reports that some amici curiae argued for an unlimited right to do as one wishes with one’s body. This theory holds, for meat any rate, much appeal. However, there would have been serious problems with its invocation in this case. In the first place, more than the mother’s own body is involved in a decision to have an abortion; a fetus may not be a “person in the whole sense,” but it is certainly not nothing. Second, it is difficult to find a basis for thinking that the theory was meant to be given constitutional sanction: Surely it is no part of the “privacy” interest the Bill of Rights suggests. [I]t is not clear to us that the claim . . . that one has an unlimited right to do with one’s body as one pleases bears a close relation ship to the right of privacy. . . Unfortunately, having thus rejected the amici’s attempt to define the bounds of the general constitutional right of which the right to an abortion is a part, on the theory that the general right described has little to do with privacy, the Court provides neither an alternative definition nor an account of why it thinks privacy is involved. It simply announces that the right to privacy “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” Apparently this conclusion is thought to derive from the passage that immediately follows it: The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent. Specific and direct harm medically diagnosable even in early pregnancy may be involved. Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health may be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it. In other cases, as in this one, the additional difficulties and continuing stigma of unwed motherhood may be involved. All of this is true and ought to be taken very seriously. But it has nothing to do with privacy in the Bill of Rights sense or any other the Constitution suggests. I suppose there is nothing to prevent one from using the word “privacy” to mean the freedom to live one’s life without governmental interference. But the Court obviously does not so use the term. Nor could it, for such a right is at stake in every case. Our life styles are constantly limited, often seriously, by governmental regulation; and while many of us would prefer less direction, granting that desire the status of a preferred constitutional right would yield a sys tem of “government” virtually unrecognizable to us and only slightly more recognizable to our forefathers. The Court’s observations concerning the serious, life-shaping costs of having a child prove what might to the thoughtless have seemed unprovable: That even though a human life, or a potential human life, hangs in the balance, the moral dilemma abortion poses is so difficult as to be heartbreaking. What they fail to do is even begin to resolve that dilemma so far as our governmental system is concerned by associating either side of the balance with a value inferable from the Constitution."