CRS Legal Sidebar – Privacy Rights Under the Constitution: Procreation, Child Rearing, Contraception, Marriage, and Sexual Activity, September 14, 2022: “A line of Supreme Court cases establishes that the U.S. Constitution guaranteesa person’s ability to make certain decisions in matters related to procreation, child rearing, contraception, marriage (including interracial marriage and same-sex marriage), and consensual sexual activity. In some instances, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to provide substantive protections against government interference in these personal matters. The Supreme Court has also characterized the Equal Protection Clause as supplementing these due process protections when a state seeks to limit the exercise of protected rights to particular groups, resulting in the Court striking down laws that, for example, denied the “fundamental” right to marriage to interracial or same-sex couples. The Court’s approach to identifying rights protected by the Constitution has changed over the years. In the 1997 decision Washington v. Glucksberg, the Court stated that the standard for recognizing such rights is that they must be “‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ and ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.’” Before and after Glucksberg, however, the Court acknowledged that some rights do not necessarily fit into that historical framework.”