"Brennan’s memo shows that he saw connections between Douglas’s fundamental rights-based “Papacristou” opinion and Blackmun’s forthcoming Roe opinion, which was to be based on the same constitutional theory. He was worried that other, more conservative Justices would see the same connections and that they would hesitate to sign onto Roe for fear of broadening substantive due process to include everything in Douglas’s opinion as well. That Brennan was preoccupied with Roe in the winter of 1971 is hardly surprising. Think of the historical context. Behind the Court was Griswold v. Connecticut-that wide-ranging survey of constitutional provisions that the Justices hopes might justify judicial protection of fundamental rights. Griswold is the constitutional law professor’s dream The Court struck down Connecticut’s law prohibiting the use of contraceptives by married couples with numerous Justices in multiple opinions transparently struggling to find protection or rights nowhere listed in the Constitution. Famously, Douglas constructed a majority opinion in which the “penumbras” of the Bill o Rights created a right to privacy that thwarted the Connecticut law. The Court was clearly still wrangling with such issues six years later, when it faced both Eisenstadt v. Baird and Roe v. Wade in 1971. In Eisenstadt, Brennan authored a somewhat strained plurality opinion holding that equal protection required that individuals have the same rights to contraceptives as married couples. He thereby avoided expanding any of the substantive theories Griswold had propounded."