Birth Control and Privacy Rights

In these cases, the Supreme Court extended the previously-established Right to Privacy to married couples and then to individuals. In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Court declared that married couples had the right to privacy between them and with their doctor, and that this privacy applied to reproductive decision-making. Therefore, after the Griswold decision, doctors could legally prescribe contraceptive medications and devices to married couples. Following this rhetoric, the Supreme Court extended marital privacy rights to individuals in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), and declared that unmarried people could be prescribed contraceptive care by their doctors. In both these cases, the Right to Privacy, protected under the "penumbra" of the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process clause, underlaid the right to reproductive decision making.  This precedent was also applied in Roe v. Wade (1973).