I'll take this bait. The Constitution guards against abuses by state governments through the 14th Amendment. Properly read, the amendment protects the privileges and immunities (i.e., the constitutional liberties and guarantees) of citizens against violation by the states and prevents the deprivation of life, liberty and property without due process of law for all persons. Lochner vs. New York, much maligned by progressives and overturned by the Roosevelt court, correctly ruled that New York's interference in the freedom to contract constituted a violation of the 14th Amendment, thereby striking down a maximum hours law meant to shield established bakers from innovative competitors which had employees bake at night for four hours, sleep for eight on the job, and package the goods for four hours in the morning.
Now what are the reasonable exceptions by which a government can constrain liberties? Traditionally, these are called the police powers of the state, which are divided into the safety, health, morals, and general (as in, universal) welfare of society. A legitimate exercise of police power requires a legitimate justification. Indiscriminate warrantless wiretapping by the NSA is not an appropriate limitation of the 4th Amendment, because the poorly-justified benefits bear no relation to the authoritarian means. Likewise, states cannot erect anti-competitive barriers to interstate trade in the name of consumer safety -- a ploy attempted all too often, but usually caught by a Supreme Court hyper-attuned to state rather than federal overreach (the constitutional principle of interstate free trade is called the Dormant Commerce Clause).
In Griswold vs. Connecticut, the law banning the use of prophylactics might have been appropriate before knowledge of germ theory, when a stigma against promiscuity helped prevent the spread of sexually transmitted disease. But by the 1960s, the law had no justification under the morals head of the police power and only served to restrict the liberties of individuals without commensurate benefits but with evident harms, since it was then known that prophylactic use prevents the spread of STDs. The law, if still accepted by the majority of the people of Connecticut at the time, was a majoritarian infringement of the liberties of a minority.
Note that my reasoning in Griswold does not follow the incoherent account of Justice Douglas, who resorted in proper progressive fashion to the invisible "umbras and penumbras" of the 4th Amendment. Instead, the proper justification flows from the circumscribed powers of the state in a classical liberal reading of the Constitution, which is the consummately classical liberal text. Therefore, the correct result in Griswold does not lead to Roe v. Wade, because the morals head of the police power surely encompasses protection of the life of the unborn, for which there is ample practical justification for the circumscription of the "pure freedom" of the woman and abortionist. Under the Constitution, it should be left to the states to exert this police power, just as all but the handful of federal crimes enumerated in the Constitution are also within the rightful domain of the states.
