The Constitution and Doctrinal Development

It is fascinating four of the five justices who are supposed to deliver this "strict constructionist" interpretation of the Constitution and bring us back to what the Constitution is supposed to be are Roman Catholics. Scalia was, before he died, as are Thomas, Roberts, Alito, and Kavanaugh. But Catholics have a theory as to how you can get the claim that Jesus was of one substance with the father into the Nicene creed even though the Bible says nothing about substances, how Mary can be ever-virgin even though the Bible at least appears to talk about Jesus's brothers, how Mary can be immaculately conceived and assumed into heaven even though there's nothing in the Bible about that, and that is the conception, developed in Newman's famous work, or doctrinal development. If you accept doctrinal development for Christian doctrine, then why not for the Constitution as well. Hence, the right of privacy isn't spelled out in the Bill of Rights, to be sure, but, as developed in Griswold v. Connecticut, isn't it a reasonable development from Constitutional ideas that ought to prevent state governments from outlawing birth control? And the next step from there is the application of privacy to the case of abortion in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Of course this argument wouldn't work if the Court had decided that fetuses had a knowable right to life that overrides the right to privacy, but the majority argued that we couldn't know whether a fetus has a right to life, so the right we know (privacy) overrules a right of which we are reasonably uncertain. Remarkably, the so-called "pro-life" arguments against Roe actually attack the absoluteness of the privacy right, rather than arguing in favor of a fetus's right to life. Development of constitutional doctrine undercuts the central originalist argument against Roe. If you undercut the absoluteness of the woman's right to privacy, then neither the right of privacy nor the right to life takes precendence on Constitutional grounds, and it can be up to the states whether there are laws against abortion or not. But pro-life defenders argue that we can know that fetuses have a right to life, and if they argued that against Roe, they could get the court to actually outlaw abortion across the board. Making abortion a state decision seems to me to violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which was designed to eliminate the possibility that, for example, Dred Scott could be a slave in a slave state but free in a free state. Claiming that fetuses can be persons in Alabama but nonpersons in New York strikes me as incoherent, regardless of what you think about abortion in general. But that is the legal result that pro-life defenders seem to want. I suppose going for state decision may be the most pragmatic way to save fetuses, but it strikes me as incoherent and intellectually dishonest.