Funny you should ask :) This is from a larger paper I recently wrote called "Against Judicial Activism" - okay this stuff has been on my mind. On this point, I argued:
"Even in areas where the Courts made unambiguously progressive decisions, as in its sexual equality decisions, they were largely reflecting social changes underway that would rapidly have been reflected in legislation without their actions. In fact, by acting preemptively, the Court may have short-circuited more comprehensive legislation and the Equal Rights Amendment. In Reed v. Reed and Frontiero v. Richardson , the Court used the Due Process clause to make sex a "suspect classification." Yet even Justices concurring in the decisions noted the danger of these decisions. As Justice Powell argued in his Frontiero concurrence:
"The Equal Rights Amendment, which if adopted will resolve the substance of this precise question, has been approved by the Congress and submitted for ratification by the States.By acting prematurely and unnecessarily, as I view it, the Court has assumed a decisional responsibility at the very time when state legislatures, functioning within the traditional democratic process, are debating the proposed Amendment."
The irony is that if the Court liberals had wanted to advance women's rights most comprehensively, they would have joined Rehnquist's dissent. The resulting reaction probably would have sped passage of the ERA before opposition was gathered to defeat it in the critical last states. The idea that judicial restraint in such areas encourage comprehensive responses is not just rhetoric, but shown in the area of gender equality in the Court decisions on discrimination based on pregnancy. In key decisions, the Court found that women had neither constitutional nor statutory protection against discrimination based on pregnancy. The result was a political mobilization that resulted in the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) which comprehensively banned discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions.
Which brings us to Roe, the flipside of the debate over protection for the right to be pregnant- or rather not the flipside, since the Court in its infinite wisdom separated out abortion into a completely different constitutional sphere from gender and pregnancy rights into the zone of privacy rights. Notably, where the constitutional and legislative protections against sexual and pregnancy discrimination applied to insurance, a "liberty" right to privacy around abortion created no similar mandate for equal treatment when funding issues were involved, allowing governments to treat funding for abortions differently from other medical issues and deny them to indigent women.
If the Court had not preemptively jumped to create a right to abortion with Roe, the mobilization for abortion rights would have added to the energy to pass the ERA. If the Court had then found a right to abortion based on sexual equality with the new democratic mandate of a constitutional mandate, its legitimacy would not be in doubt and it would no doubt have been extended to funding equality as with the rest of the sexual equality jurisprudence.
Even if the ERA had not been passed, we would not have had the fracturing of political coalitions supporting abortion rights. Along with energizing a conservative Christian backlash, the other result of the Court's constitutionally tailored right for economically well-off women to have abortions was to allow economically conservative professional women to join the Reagan coalition, knowing that the courts would prevent their coalition partners from impacting their reproductive freedoms. If poor women had not been left on their own in the legislative arena, a much broader coalition for abortion rights would have sustained itself.
More broadly, the separation of abortion, pregnancy and sexual discrimination into different constitutional and legislative spheres has frustrated the democratic process fully grappling with the integrated issues of the tension between social reproduction in the home and women's participation in the workplace. Instead of a broader discussion of real "choice", as in transforming the nature of work, career paths, family leave and so on which would allow women (and men) a real choice between abortion and having children at certain points in their lives, we've ended up with a splintering of politics over abortion between women committed to a home life and professional women, a polarization well documented by writers like Kristin Luker in her Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Sociologist Theda Skocpol has noted how the earlier period of Lochner judicial activism extended differential protections to women and thereby frustrated democratic debate and deformed the shape of the emerging welfare state in the United States.