Women are still fighting to be seen fully and equally as people, with absolute rights over their persons.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/to-have-and-to-hold
This spring marks the fiftieth anniversary of the case that went forward instead: Griswold v. Connecticut. (“We became the footnote to the footnote,” Trubek told me.) In Griswold, decided in June, 1965, the Supreme Court ruled 7–2 that Connecticut’s ban on contraception was unconstitutional, not on the ground of a woman’s right to determine the timing and the number of her pregnancies but on the ground of a married couple’s right to privacy. “We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights,” Justice William O. Douglas wrote in the majority opinion. “Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.” [snip]
Banning contraception at a time when the overwhelming majority of Americans used it was, of course, ridiculous. (Justice Potter Stewart, who dissented in Griswold, called the Connecticut statute “an uncommonly silly law.”) The law was little enforced. Condoms were openly sold in drugstores, and people of means could get other forms of contraception out of state. (Estelle Griswold once asked whether the police intended to “put a gynecological table at the Greenwich toll station” and examine every woman who crossed the state line.) The ban was a real hardship, though, for the poor, and especially for poor women in relationships with men who refused to use condoms. And if the law was ridiculous it was also intransigent. For decades, Planned Parenthood had tried to get it overturned in the Connecticut legislature, to no avail. So the question was: What legal argument could be used to challenge its constitutionality?
The Constitution never mentions sex, marriage, or reproduction. This is because the political order that the Constitution established was a fraternity of free men who, believing themselves to have been created equal, consented to be governed. Women did not and could not give their consent: they were neither free nor equal. Rule over women lay entirely outside a Lockean social contract in a relationship not of liberty and equality but of confinement and subjugation. As Mary Astell wondered, in 1706, “If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?” [snip]
There is a lesson in the past fifty years of litigation. When the fight for equal rights for women narrowed to a fight for reproductive rights, defended on the ground of privacy, it weakened. But when the fight for gay rights became a fight for same-sex marriage, asserted on the ground of equality, it got stronger and stronger.