Closing the Circle of Constitutional Review from Griswold v. Connecticut to Roe v. Wade: An Outline of a Decision Merely Overruling Roe

Griswold v. Connecticut 2 held that no state may make pregnancy a state-imposed risk of sexual intimacy within marriage. To the extent that there are medically safe means of minimizing pregnancy risks two people who are married to each other do not want to incur as an incident of their marital sexually intimacy, Griswold held that the state may not forbid them to take such precautions to minimize those risks as they think appropriate. That a married person might attempt to use a birth-control device in relations with someone other than his or her spouse is doubtless true,3 but even so, the Court held, this observation does not justify a state