Leave it to the political Left to turn one scaremongering opportunity into multiple ones, even against direct evidence that the fears are unfounded.

Not content with imagining a parade of pregnancy-related horribles if Justice Samuel Alito’s draft abortion decision becomes law, leftists insist that “same-sex marriage, contraception,” and even civil rights might now be headed for the back alley. Business Insider devoted a column to the alleged threat. So did Politico and USA Today. Ted Kennedy’s hagiographer Charles Pierce tweeted the same thing in high dudgeon, and liberal “analyst” Jeff Greenfield tweeted in support of Pierce. The list goes on.

They’re all so verklempt. Next thing you know, they’ll be saying the boogeyman is coming after their right to get tattoos.

In fact, Alito repeatedly and explicitly differentiated constitutional questions about those other subjects from the abortion question. In what amounted to a pre-buttal to the anticipated fearmongering, Alito said his draft abortion decision would not affect cases involving “the right to marry a person of a different race, the right to marry while in prison, the right to obtain contraceptives, the right to reside with relatives, the right to make decisions about the education of one’s children, the right not to be sterilized without one’s consent, and the right in certain circumstances not to undergo involuntary surgery, [or] forced administration of drugs.” (I’ve omitted Alito’s internal case citations from that quote.) He then also cited the “right to engage in private, consensual sexual acts” and the “right to marry a person of the same sex” as being similarly unaffected by the new abortion decision.

Then he explained why.

“What sharply distinguishes the [alleged] abortion right from the rights recognized in [those] cases,” he wrote (internal citations again omitted), is that “abortion destroys what [even the prior pro-choice abortion decisions] call ‘potential life’ and what the law at issue in this case regards as the ‘life of an unborn human being.’ None of those other decisions cited by [pro-choice decisions] Roe involved the critical moral question posed by abortion. They are therefore inapposite [my emphasis].”

To reemphasize the point, his very next paragraph again described “this critical distinction between the abortion right and other rights,” and elsewhere, he portrayed abortion as “fundamentally different” from “the rights recognized in past decisions involving matters such as intimate sexual relations, contraception, and marriage.” The new abortion decision “does not undermine [those] rights in any way.”

Just in case he hadn’t been clear enough, he circled back again near the opinion’s end to say that “we emphasize that our decision concerns the [alleged] constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”

How much clearer could Alito be? A question of life or death is by its very nature different from questions of personal practices and social arrangements. Indeed, the Constitution twice explicitly recognizes “life” as first among the primary goods it protects “without due process of law.” In contrast, nowhere does the document list a “right” to end a life.

Yet unlike the right to life without due process of law, there is no constitutional right that directly countervails the assertion that intimate relations are a right generally free from government proscription. The alleged right to abortion is uniquely and obviously fraught with moral and constitutional considerations.

That’s why the Left’s “slippery slope” arguments are dishonest. Alito has comprehensively allayed its fears, but people insist on spreading the fears anyway. Apparently, political hackery is the practice to which they are most avidly wedded.