the feminist librarian reads

In the half century since Griswold, Douglas’s arguments about privacy and marriage have been the signal influence on a series of landmark Supreme Court decisions. In 1972, Eisenstadt v. Baird extended Griswold’s notion of privacy from married couples to individuals. “If the right of privacy means anything,” Justice William Brennan wrote, “it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” Griswold informed Roe v. Wade, in 1973, the Court finding that the “right of privacy . . . is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” And in Lawrence v. Texas, in 2003, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing a 6–3 decision overturning a ban on sodomy, described Griswold as “the most pertinent beginning point” for the Court’s line of reasoning: the generative case.