Privation Nation

THE TIDE HAS TURNED. For half a century, the Supreme Court was on the side of sexual liberation. In case after case, the court established a zone of privacy around the body and then slowly expanded it to encompass a plethora of liberties related to gender, sex, and sexuality. This process began in 1965 with Griswold v. Connecticut, a watershed decision establishing that married couples could access birth control on the basis of the right of individuals to “a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment.” From this spectral right, nowhere articulated in the text of the Constitution, later courts found the rights of abortion in Roe v. Wade, of adults to practice sodomy in Lawrence v. Texas, and of marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges. Thanks to generations of jurisprudence, Americans today enjoy historically unprecedented bodily autonomy and sexual liberty.