This chapter addresses symmetry’s implications for gun rights and unenumerated fundamental liberties. Although recognizing an individual right to bear arms is inevitably asymmetric given current divides over gun regulation, the Supreme Court might moderate its decisions’ asymmetry in two ways: by allowing some meaningful room for firearms regulation, and by ensuring that the Second Amendment sometimes interferes with laws that are conventionally favored more by conservatives than by progressives. With respect to unenumerated rights, symmetry should support embracing some method for identifying such rights that avoids any predictable skew toward rights favored by one or the other major partisan or ideological camp. The Court’s current method of looking to “history and tradition” to define unenumerated rights could satisfy this standard, provided the Court applies it in a manner that allows recognition of new rights based on enactment of new laws over time in jurisdictions across the United States. In addition, the existing constitutional protection for parental rights, meaning parents’ authority to control key aspects of their children’s upbringing, appears not only defensible under the Court’s “history and tradition” approach but also symmetric given major current divides over certain parenting choices.

In De Officiis, Cicero values very highly the little society of parents and their children: an origin of society and seedbed of the republic, whose members should rank extraordinarily high among each other’s priorities. In light of Cicero’s biography and longstanding interest in a philosophical debate about parental love, I argue that Cicero’s position is that nature gives to humans a non-rational desire to care for their children, which leads many parents to rational love of their children, whereby they care about what is natural for at least some other humans, their children, as they care about it for themselves, holding property in common within the household. The rest of the family thereby learn loving attitudes. Such parents and their home are for their children images, however flawed, of virtue and a virtuous society. By making this experience common, nature teaches a lesson in what virtuous altruists would be like.

Miscarriage and stillbirth are not rare events and losing a baby can have an overwhelming and long-term impact on parents, on existing and subsequent children and on wider family. Potential parents’ feelings of devastation, intense grief, anxiety, guilt and self-blame and loss following such a death have been identified in literature written over past centuries. Fifty years ago, miscarriage and stillbirth were a private matter and unspoken of, leaving parents to manage their grief alone. This chapter aims to shine a light on the changes in attitudes and the support available to those who have experienced miscarriage and perinatal death since the 1960s. A review of relevant research, policy and practice identified significant advances in medical science and major changes to the law – changes that have influenced attitudes to abortion, same-sex parenthood and single mothers. Medical advances have made childbirth safer and the use of IVF has extended the opportunity of motherhood to a wider group of women. The campaigning of numerous charities has led to far greater understanding of the impact of baby loss on parental mental health and parenting capacity.