When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut and legalized the use of contraception by married women, the public response was muted. There is little evidence of an uproar on the pages of major newspapers or magazines. Even bringing the case was a challenge for reproductive-rights activists, who had tried and failed twice before to challenge Connecticut’s anti-obscenity law, which (fun fact) was introduced by P. T. Barnum in 1879 and (less fun) banned “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception.” By the 1960s, laws criminalizing contraception often went unenforced, which posed a problem for activists looking to challenge them. Without contraception-seeking patients who had actually been arrested, the Supreme Court said, there was no one with the standing to sue.

It wasn’t until Estelle Griswold, then the executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and Dr. C. Lee Buxton opened a birth-control clinic in well-advertised violation of Connecticut law that there was a contraception-rights case to take to the court. In Griswold, the court held that a constitutional right to sexual privacy protected the rights of married couples to use contraception. That right was used again to extend contraception rights to unmarried women, and then to enshrine a national right to abortion; later, it was a key argument in cases striking down bans on same-sex intercourse and same-sex marriage.

In 2022, the Supreme Court gutted it. In their Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade, the court’s majority called into question the very existence of a constitutional right to privacy. Instead, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion, the court would consider only rights explicitly outlined in the Constitution and “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” Abortion, the court determined, did not fit the bill, despite the fact that American women have been terminating pregnancies since the nation’s founding, and that the all-male Framers penned the Constitution in an era in which women did not have the right to participate in American democratic processes – but when, notably, early abortion was generally not criminalized.

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Now, the era of legal abortion in all 50 states is over, and the constitutional right to privacy may have dissolved along with it. And so the obvious question is, what’s next? Is contraception access also on the line?

Many activists, lawyers, historians, and politicians who favor abortion rights and contraception access say yes. The anti-abortion movement and many of the Republicans who represent it would generally prefer not to answer. More casual observers sometimes make an argument now darkly familiar to the abortion-rights activists who heard a similar claim pre-Dobbs: Feminists are being birth-control Chicken Littles; no one is coming for your contraception.

Even those who warn about impending attacks on contraception access generally agree that the Supreme Court is highly unlikely, at least in the immediate future, to overturn Griswold; particularly given the post-Dobbs backlash, the political will just isn’t there – nine in ten American women have used contraception, nearly all of them to prevent pregnancy. And yet we shouldn’t be lured into false comfort. At a time when abortion bans are already removing women’s control of their lives and bodies, the slow creep toward contraception restriction demands our attention now. Because as those same advocates note, Roe was not toppled in a day.

In 2020, conservative Christian Texas father Alexander Deanda filed a lawsuit over what he admitted was a nonissue: his underage daughters getting their hands on contraceptives without his permission. His daughters had not, he conceded, actually tried to go on birth control. But under the federally funded Title X family-planning program, young women are legally allowed to obtain it without parental consent. And this very possibility seemed to Deanda a violation of both his constitutional rights and his entitlements under Texas law. In March, the notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in: Deanda lost on his constitutional claim, but he won on his argument that the Texas family code, which requires parental consent for medical treatment provided to a child, should apply. Despite a federal law ostensibly superseding state law and guaranteeing young women the right to access contraception without parental interference, minors in Texas now have to get their parents’ permission if they want birth control.

“Deanda was kind of unique because Texas has a uniquely restrictive law that generally requires parental consent for any kind of medical or dental care for minors,” says Amy Myrick, a senior attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “So far, no other states have the equivalent law. But now that states have Deanda on their radar, we expect more legislative efforts to pass those........

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