How did roe v wade use amenments 14 and 9

1. How Roe described the constitutional source: privacy under the Fourteenth Amendment

The Roe majority, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, said the Constitution protects a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy as part of a broader right of privacy that the Court read into the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” and the opinion identified that liberty‑based protection as the operative constitutional hook for invalidating Texas’s abortion ban ^{[4] [5] [6]}.

2. The Ninth Amendment’s role: background, not the primary holding

Earlier courts and some opinions discussed the Ninth Amendment — which says rights not enumerated are retained by the people — and the district court in Roe initially relied on it when striking down Texas’s law; Justice Blackmun’s opinion cited precedent recognizing unenumerated privacy interests, but the Supreme Court placed the decisive constitutional enforcement mechanism in the Fourteenth Amendment rather than resting Roe primarily on the Ninth ^{[2] [7] [8]}.

3. Why the Court emphasized the Fourteenth: enforcement against states

The Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause applies directly to state action, which made it the practical vehicle for a nationwide prohibition on state criminalization of pre‑viability abortions: Roe framed abortion regulation as a state action that could not unreasonably intrude on an individual’s liberty interest absent sufficient justification, and thus used the Fourteenth Amendment to restrain state laws ^{[3] [4] [5]}.

4. The interplay of jurisprudence: Griswold, privacy precedents, and Roe

Roe drew on prior privacy cases (notably Griswold on contraception) and on Justice Arthur Goldberg’s concurrence about unenumerated rights; the Supreme Court treated those precedents as establishing a “zone” of personal liberty, then situated abortion within that zone using the Fourteenth Amendment’s liberty concept while acknowledging Ninth Amendment reasoning in the background ^{[7] [2] [9]}.

5. Subsequent shifts and the Dobbs reversal: how the framing mattered

Decades later, the Dobbs majority reexamined Roe’s reliance on the Fourteenth Amendment and concluded the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, explicitly rejecting Roe’s substantive‑due‑process foundation and pointing to historical practices at the time the Fourteenth was adopted as evidence against a deeply rooted abortion right ^{[10] [11]}. Dobbs shows that putting the enforceable rule in the Fourteenth—rather than, say, in statutory law or an alternative constitutional text—left the right vulnerable to reinterpretation of substantive due process ^[10].

6. Competing perspectives and legal arguments about the Ninth Amendment

Supporters of Roe’s reasoning point to the Ninth Amendment as confirming that unenumerated rights exist (and therefore help justify privacy‑based rights), and some lower courts initially stressed the Ninth; scholars and advocates argue that the Ninth signals that not all fundamental liberties must be spelled out in the Bill of Rights ^{[2] [12]}. Critics and later majorities, however, viewed the Ninth as too indeterminate to carry the enforceable rule against states—hence the Supreme Court’s choice to ground the holding in the Fourteenth ^{[2] [7]}.

7. What available sources do not mention

Available sources do not mention any alternative constitutional bases for Roe beyond the Fourteenth and Ninth that carried controlling weight in the Supreme Court’s decision (for example, explicit reliance on the First or Fourth as the primary holding is not described in the cited reporting) ^{[7] [3]}.

8. Bottom line for readers

Roe located abortion rights within a constitutional privacy doctrine and operationalized that doctrine by enforcing liberty against state action under the Fourteenth Amendment, while treating the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of unenumerated rights as supportive background reasoning; that doctrinal choice shaped both Roe’s protective sweep and the legal pathway by which later courts—most notably in Dobbs—could overturn it ^{[4] [2] [10]}.