These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

In 1969, Nixon had asked Congress to increase federal funding for family planning, and in the House, George H. W. Bush, a decorated navy pilot and young Republican congressman from Texas, pressed the case. “We need to make family planning a household word,” Bush said. (So known was Bush for his support for family planning that he got the nickname “Rubbers.”) In 1972, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, the court extended Griswold’s notion of privacy from married couples to individuals. “If the right of privacy means anything,” Justice 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.”