Eisenstadt v. Baird - At The Supreme Court

Eisenstadt appealed to the Supreme Court. This time, the Court announced that it would hear the appeal. Oral arguments were presented on 19 and 20 November 1971, before seven justices. Nolan, arguing for Massachusetts, emphasized Baird's lack of a medical license and claimed that "there are some very dangerous side lights and side effects to the use of many contraceptives."

Nolan dismissed any possible comparison to Griswold, which had been decided on the basis of a married couple's "right to privacy," since this case involved a very public display of contraceptives. Joseph Tydings, a former U.S. senator from Maryland, who had replaced Balliro as Baird's attorney, said that the Massachusetts law was "inherently unconstitutional because there is no compelling state reason for it."

On 22 March 1972, the Supreme Court agreed and affirmed the judgment of the First Circuit Court of Appeals. The majority opinion, written by Justice Brennan, further defined the Ninth Amendment right of privacy first enunciated in Griswold:

If under Griswold the distribution of contraceptives to married persons cannot be prohibited, a ban on distribution to unmarried persons would be equally impermissible. It is true that in Griswold the right of privacy in question inhered in the marital relationship. Yet the marital couple is not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own, but an association of two individuals each with a separate intellectual and emotional make-up. If the right of privacy means anything, 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.

In 1973, the right to privacy was found by the Supreme Court to protect a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy, in Roe v. Wade. Four years later, the Supreme Court, citing Eisenstadt, ruled that states could not prohibit the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried minors (Carey v. Population Services International, 1977).