Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-2015
Journal Title
Yale Law Journal Forum
Abstract
Challenges to federal law requiring insurance coverage of contraception are occurring on the eve of the 50th Anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut. It is a good time to reflect on the values served by protecting women’s access to contraception.
In 1965, the Court ruled in Griswold that a law criminalizing the use of contraception violated the privacy of the marriage relationship. Griswoldoffered women the most significant constitutional protection since the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, constitutional protection as important as the cases prohibiting sex discrimination that the Court would decide in the next decade—perhaps even more so. Griswold is conventionally understood to have secured liberty for women. But the right to contraception also secures equality for women, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg saw clearly in the 1970s and as the Court eventually would explain in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
First Page
349
Last Page
358
Num Pages
10
Volume Number
124
Publisher
Yale Law School
Recommended Citation
Neil S. Siegel & Reva B. Siegel,
Contraception as a Sex Equality Right,
124
Yale L.J. F.
349
(2015).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/2245
File Type
Included in
Constitutional Law Commons, Fourteenth Amendment Commons, Health Law and Policy Commons, Supreme Court of the United States Commons