What does the 9th Amendment mean?

[Verily]

the bill of rights is a safeguard of the rights of the people, it is not their source. is not an exhaustive list of the rights retained by the people. if you read it in conjunction with the tenth amendment, it makes sense.

What I'm getting at is that this, put together with the Fourteenth Amendment, really belies claims that there isn't a right to privacy in the Constitution, that there isn't a right to marry in the Constitution, etc.

some elements of a right to privacy are implied by the Bill of Rights. no part of the Constitution deals with marriage - it is only when there is unwarranted discrimination by the government that it could conceivably be an issue, even with the fourteenth amendment.

How about a right to abortion? I think everyone, supporters and opponents, can agree that, regardless of the privacy rights explicitly in the Constitution, abortion is not contained in those explicitly contained.

Anyway, the 9th Amendment is as much a blank check as the 10th Amendment is a restriction on the power of the federal government. They can be read to mean whatever you want (give or take away whatever power you want) because they were added, not because they were good policy (or for any policy reasons at all), but because the Framers needed some of the more ardent Federalists and Anti-Federalists aboard. As a result, they have no attached legislative intent (other than getting states to ratify the Constitution), and judges can do whatever the hell they want with them since the wording makes no attempt to clarify.

[Verily]

We could be like the Roman Republic, and rely solely on precedent and whatnot. 

Or, you know, like the United Kingdom, which is the same way.

     Not a system I would rather like to emulate, given the tendency of politicians through the ages towards incredible abuses of power.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the United Kingdom hasn't had an autocratic regime since roughly one hundred years before our Constitution was written.

William Pitt the Younger disagrees. 

Seriously, though, the guy suspended Habeas Corpus, public political meetings were banned (except those for the express purpose of petitioning Parliament, and even those were limited), dispersed armed forces throughout the countryside, and other lovely measures.  He might have just been Prime Minister, but he had some pretty autocratic power.

All that happened before Britain was a democracy, anyway. The existence of Parliament alone did not make it so. Britain certainly has had no major abuses since 1832 (a rather arbitrary designation for the beginning of democracy in Britain, but it was a process).