"By the time the Court decided Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s privacy jurisprudence was already in disarray. Griswold said that the right to privacy is found in the penumbra of the Bill of Rights, Eisenstadt extended Griswold but on equal protection grounds, and the district court in Roe said that the right to abortion is found in the Ninth Amendment. In Roe, the Supreme Court added multiple jurisprudential wrinkles by holding that the right to privacy is instead “founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty.” The Court thus appeared to transplant the requirement of a “compelling state interest” for infringing on a “fundamental” right from the equal protection to the due process context, but failing to apply this standard at all. Dissenting inRoe, Justice William Rehnquist wrote that the Court “will accomplish the seemingly impossible feat of leaving this area of the law more confused than [the Court] found it.” Justice Clarence Thomas has explained that federal judges “interpret and apply written law to the facts of particular cases.” The Supreme Court, however, eschewed this basic approach in Roe v. Wade, putting off any examination of the constitutional issue at the heart of the case until Section VIII, nearly 40 pages into a 54-page majority opinion. Blackmun acknowledged both that “[t]he Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy” and that the presence of the unborn child makes abortion “inherently different” from other unenumerated rights that the Court had deemed to be fundamental. Because the right to abortion had no connection to the Constitution’s text—and barely any connection to precedent—Blackmun justified creating the right to abortion by offering a list of “detriment[s]” that “denying this choice” would impose."