"Briefly, I look at three such costs of the abortion right, which I refer to as (1) legitimation costs, (2) democratic costs, and (3) aspirational costs. All three of these general types of costs of rights have been well developed in the various “rights critiques” produced by critical legal scholars during the 1970s and 1980s. None, however, has been applied to the particular case of abortion rights. Individual, negative, constitution al rights, according to their critics, keep the state off our backs and out of our lives, but they also run the risk of legitimating the injustices we sustain in the insulated privacy so created; they denigrate the democratic processes that might generate positive law that could better respond to our vulnerabilities and meet our needs; and they truncate our collective visions of law’s moral possibilities. All three costs, I will argue, attend to the abortion right created by Roe v. Wade."