"I repeat, so as not to be misunderstood, that this Court does have power, which it should exercise, to hold laws unconstitutional where they are forbidden by the Federal Constitution. My point is that there is no provision of the Constitution which either expressly or impliedly vests power in this Court to sit as a supervisory agency over acts of duly constituted legislative bodies and set aside their laws because of the Court's belief that the legislative policies adopted are unreasonable, unwise, arbitrary, capricious or irrational. The adoption of such a loose flexible uncontrolled standard for holding laws unconstitutional, if ever it is finally achieved, will amount to a great unconstitutional shift of power to the courts which I believe and am constrained to say will be bad for the courts, and worse for the country. Subjecting federal and state laws to such an unrestrained and unrestrainable judicial control as to the wisdom of legislative enactments would, I fear, jeopardize the separation of governmental powers that the Framers set up, and, at the same time, threaten to take away much of the power of States to govern themselves which the Constitution plainly intended them to have."
--Hugo Black, Griswold v. Connecticut (dissent), 1965

In this case, justice Black is wrong. The ninth amendment protects the right to privacy of married couples, in their bedroom, from raids of state troopers breaking in, looking for contraceptives, all of which were illegal under then state law.
My old professor, Fr. Henle, SJ. (St. Louis University) told us, "The Constitution, in its preamble and in all of its provisions, is in complete accord with natural-law teaching. Most spectaacuarly, the Ninth Amendment is unintelligible and has been quite neglected because it is a fundamental natural-law statement."
Guido

Guido: I find it interesting that That Fr. Henle thinks of the 9th as a Natural Law statement. Perhaps. But it doesn't, at all, follow that contraception would then be protected by it. But that is a bit beside the point.

Why does the ninth amendment include "the right to privacy of married couples, in their bedroom, from raids of state troopers breaking in, looking for contraceptives" and not the right of a living human fetus in the womb from raids of hot electrified pok-ers looking to kill them?

Besides, in the Griswold case there was no question of raids into married couples' bedrooms: Estelle Griswold was prosecuted and fined $100 for distributing birth control in a public business. How was her, or anyone else's, "privacy" violated here?

Skeptic, lets not get coy. Connecticut law entirely forbid using contraceptives. Griswold was only one facit of the reach of the state legislature's intrusion.
Guido

Guido: I may be wrong, but I think the Connecticut law only forbid distributing contraception, not the ownership or use of it by married couples.

Maybe someone else who knows more about the case could tell us.

Skeptic,
Connecticut statute forbid the use...
I think the law was the consequence of a religious faction's control of a state ligislature.
Guido

Guido, you are right about the Conn law forbidding use, although you are certainly the one being coy -- pretending as though there were a police force raiding married people's bedrooms when clearly there was not. In this case, Griswold's very public behavior was protected by the SC as though it were sacrosactly private.

Moreover, clearly not everything that spouses do to/with each other should be protected by a "right to privacy," don't you agree? Your rather alarmist argument so far indicates otherwise.

We could raise your "police raid" fear regarding anything kept in a bedroom: a gun, or drugs, or an illegal alien, or what have you. So why act as though the police-raid issue is actually a relevant issue? It is not.

Here's the ninth amendment, which says nothing about rights to "marital privacy." Nor does it intimate that the rights that it acknowledges are Constitutional rights, but instead talks of rights "retained by the people."

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

It's also instructive to read the ninth in context with the tenth:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

In other words, if a power is not specifically spelled out in the Constitution, the states or the people retain those powers. The federal "right" to veto laws against contraception, or marital privacy, is spelled out nowhere in the Constitution, and therefore not a power of the federal government. People have the right to make their own laws, even if, as Potter Stewart said of Connecticut's law, it is "an uncommonly silly law."

The verb phrase in the Ninth Amendemnt is "shall not be construed." It was obviously an intruction to judges, not an etablishment of broad unarticulated rights.

Courts are supposed to decide the cases in front of them. The case in front of that Court was about public distribution not "privacy." Planned Parenthood could not create a real "privacy" case because Connecticut would not prosecute for use.

Justice Black demolished Goldberg's and Guido's misinterpretation of the Ninth Amendment in his dissenting opinion in the case.

"Nor does anything in the history of the Amendment offer any support for such a shocking doctrine. The whole history of the adoption of the Constitution and Bill of Rights points the other way, and the very material quoted by my Brother Goldberg shows that the Ninth Amendment was intended to protect against the idea that "by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power" to the Federal Government, "those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government [the United States], and were consequently insecure." That Amendment was passed, not to broaden the powers of this Court or any other department of "the General Government," but, as every student of history knows, to assure the people that the Constitution in all its provisions was intended to limit the Federal Government to the powers granted expressly or by necessary implication. If any broad, unlimited power to hold laws unconstitutional because they offend what this Court conceives to be the "[collective] conscience of our people" is vested in this Court by the Ninth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, or any other provision of the Constitution, it was not given by the Framers, but rather has been bestowed on the Court by the Court. This fact is perhaps responsible for the peculiar phenomenon that for a period of a century and a half no serious suggestion was ever made that the Ninth Amendment, enacted to protect state powers against federal invasion, could be used as a weapon of federal power to prevent state legislatures from passing laws they consider appropriate to govern local affairs. Use of any such broad, unbounded judicial authority would make of this Court's members a day-to-day constitutional convention."

Again,Justice Black was wrong. In the real world, if he had 'demolished' Justice Goldberg's (with the Chief Justice and Justice Brennon concurring) intrepretation; that Connecticut's birth-control law unconstitutionaly intrudes upon the right of marital privacy,
Connecticut's "silly" law would have continued to foist upon its citizens via the power of the state, unwanted intrusion in their birth control efforts to satisfy a religious faction in the state legislature. (The longest sentence I think I ever wrote.)
Guido

Guido: "The ninth amendment protects the right to privacy of married couples, in their bedroom, from raids of state troopers breaking in, looking for contraceptives...."

Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Suppose for the sake of argument that the right to (marital) privacy is a right "retained by the people." All that the Ninth Amendment says is that the Federal Constitution does not deny such rights. It's language is entirely consistent with the denial of privacy by state law, hand-waving about "fundamental natural-law statements" notwithstanding.

Goldberg's argument in his concurring opinion has never been held by a majority of the Court, and was not believed necessary to come the decision in Griswold, even for Goldberg. So, in any world, especially the unreal world of these "legal realists," demolishing it would have had no effect on the majority's decision, which was based on different, but equally fictitious, grounds. Probably no member of the Court today would concur with Goldberg, but they still uphold Griswold.

But then demolishing any argument by Goldberg, or Warren, or Brennan, or Douglas, or Marshall would have made no difference in their decisions. As is particularly evidenced by some of the interviews given by Warren and Marshall after they were off the Court, that group didn't care about arguments, or precedent, or their real responsibilities or their oaths to uphold the Constitution. They cared about getting to the "right" result in every case.