When Louise Trubek and her husband, Dave, drove from New Haven to Washington to listen to oral arguments before the Supreme Court in Trubek v. Ullman, she was pregnant. The Trubeks had met at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and married in 1958. The next year, while they were both students at Yale Law School, they filed a complaint against the State of Connecticut about a statute that prevented their physician, C. Lee Buxton, the chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Yale Medical School, from discussing contraception with them. They wanted to have children one day, according to the complaint, but “a pregnancy at this time would mean a disruption of Mrs. Trubek’s professional education.” By the time that Trubek v. Ullman reached the Supreme Court, in the spring of 1961, Louise Trubek had graduated from law school and was ready to start a family. The case was dismissed, without explanation.

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.”

In the half century since Griswold, Douglas’s arguments about privacy and marriage have been the signal influence on a series of landmark Supreme Court decisions. In 1972, Eisenstadt v. Baird extended Griswold’s notion of privacy from married couples to individuals. “If the right of privacy means anything,” Justice William Brennan wrote, “it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” Griswold informed Roe v. Wade, in 1973, the Court finding that the “right of privacy . . . is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” And in Lawrence v. Texas, in 2003, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing a 6–3 decision overturning a ban on sodomy, described Griswold as “the most pertinent beginning point” for the Court’s line of reasoning: the generative case.

A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges, a consolidation of the petitions of four couples seeking relief from state same-sex-marriage bans in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. The federal Defense of Marriage Act was struck down by the Court in 2013, in U.S. v. Windsor, a ruling in which Kennedy cited and quoted his opinion in Lawrence. But bans still stand in thirteen states. In 2004, Ohio passed a law stating that “only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this state.” The Ohioans James Obergefell and John Arthur had been together for nearly twenty years when Arthur was diagnosed with A.L.S., in 2011. In 2013, they flew to Maryland, a state without a same-sex-marriage ban, and were married on the tarmac. Arthur died three months later, at the age of forty-eight. To his widower, he was, under Ohio law, a stranger. The Court is expected to issue a ruling in June.

The coincidence of the fiftieth anniversary of the Court’s ruling in Griswold and its anticipated decision in Obergefell makes this, inescapably, an occasion for considering the past half century of legal reasoning about reproductive and gay rights. The cases that link Griswold to Obergefell are the product of political movements that have been closely allied, both philosophically and historically. That sex and marriage can be separated from reproduction is fundamental to both movements, and to their legal claims. Still, there’s a difference between the arguments of political movements and appeals to the Constitution. Good political arguments are expansive: they broaden and deepen the understanding of citizens and of legislators. Bad political arguments are as frothy as soapsuds: they get bigger and bigger, until they pop. But both good and bad constitutional arguments are more like blown-in insulation: they fill every last nook of a very cramped space, and then they harden. Over time, arguments based on a right to privacy have tended to weaken and crack; arguments based on equality have grown only stronger.

Estelle Griswold became the director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut in 1953, the year that Vern Countryman, a professor at Yale Law School and a former law clerk of Justice Douglas, bought a box of condoms from a drugstore in Hamden and then went to the police and asked them to arrest the druggist for violating an 1879 statute banning the sale of contraceptives. Countryman and several of his colleagues at the law school, including Fowler Harper, were interested in challenging the ban by concocting a test case. So was Griswold, who was tired of driving around Connecticut with boxes of diaphragms in the trunk of her car. By 1957, they’d teamed up with Buxton, who agreed to identify patients who could serve as plaintiffs, and with a civil-liberties attorney named Catherine Roraback. In 1958 and 1959, Roraback filed complaints on behalf of four married couples, a set of plaintiffs that, like the petitioners in this year’s same-sex-marriage cases, were carefully selected. All but the Trubeks, whose complaint was filed separately, chose anonymity. Jane Doe had suffered a stroke near the end of a pregnancy; the child had been stillborn, and Doe had been partially paralyzed; another pregnancy might end her life. Pauline and Paul Poe had three children born with multiple congenital abnormalities; all three had died shortly after birth. Harold and Hannah Hoe had a genetic incompatibility that led their doctor to strongly recommend against having children.

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?”