Constitutional rights
The right to privacy often means the right to personal autonomy, or the right to choose whether or not to engage in certain acts or have certain experiences. Several amendments to the U.S. Constitution have been used in varying degrees of success in determining a right to personal autonomy:
The First Amendment protects the privacy of beliefs
The Third Amendment protects the privacy of the home against the use of it for housing soldiers
The Fourth Amendment protects privacy against unreasonable searches
The Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination, which in turn protects the privacy of personal information
The Ninth Amendment says that the "enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people." This has been interpreted as justification for broadly reading the Bill of Rights to protect privacy in ways not specifically provided in the first eight amendments.
The right to privacy is most often cited in the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, which states:
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
However, the protections have been narrowly defined and usually only pertain to family, marriage, motherhood, procreation and child rearing.
For example, the Supreme Court first recognized that the various Bill of Rights guarantees creates a "zone of privacy" in Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 ruling that upheld marital privacy and struck down bans on contraception.
