Throughout U.S. history, marriage has been deemed a social good, especially for women. .....

The law has traditionally constructed marriage as limited to two people, one man and one woman, whose marriage creates a legal unity represented in the public sphere by the male partner. Thus, until the Married Women's Property Acts of the 1840s, married women were not able to own property or enter into contracts because their legal existence had been extinguished by the status of marriage. Rooted in the theory of the legal unity of marriage are more recent laws, including state statutes that attempted to require spousal notification before a married woman could obtain an abortion. The Supreme Court has declared that these spousal notification laws violate constitutional privacy (Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey). Perhaps ironically, the notion of constitutional privacy itself springs from the notion of marriage as a legal unity; the first case recognizing a privacy right to obtain contraception identified the right in relation to the sanctity of the marital relation (Griswold v. Connecticut).