Griswold v. Connecticut
—Chrissie
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In the late nineteenth century, there was a push in the United States for laws dictating morality. The best-known of these surround the use of alcohol and led to the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which outlawed the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol to be used in beverages. Another of these moral laws was the Comstock Act of 1873, which prohibited the US Postal Service from carrying obscene materials, of which the means and explanation of methods of birth control and abortion were included. Some states went further, using this a precedent to outlaw the use and even possession of such materials. There were attempts to overturn the Comstock Act and the state laws proceeding from it almost immediately, on the basis that such restrictions were a violation of the First Amendment. However, the law stood until the 1965 Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the only states that still outlawed contraception were Massachusetts and Connecticut. However, the Planned Parenthood Association and the Connecticut Birth Control League didn’t let the law stop them. The first Planned Parenthood clinic in Connecticut opened in 1935, with the full knowledge that it was likely to prompt legal action. They were required to stop giving out contraceptive information in 1939, but the clinics were not shut down as they provided other needed medical services. Over the next two decades, there were efforts to bring suit against the state, with the idea that the case would end up in front of the Supreme Court, who would then overturn the law. In the meantime, the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut (PPLC) provided transportation to neighboring states where birth control and abortion were legal.
In 1961, PPLC Executive Director Estelle Griswold and Dr. C. Lee Buxton opened a birth control clinic in New Haven, CT. They were arrested, tried, and found guilty of violating the obscenity law and fined $100. They appealed the decision to the circuit court, where it was upheld, then to the state supreme court, who also upheld it. From there, it was included in the cases to be heard by the Supreme Court in 1965. There, the argument of the defense was that the outlawing of birth control was a violation of one’s right to privacy, focusing particularly on the privacy of married couples. The Court agreed. The decision said that the state could provide no compelling reason that they should be allowed to violate a married couple’s privacy. In his majority opinion Justice William Douglas bluntly makes the point, saying “Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship.”[1]
The case and the decision were, still, a product of their time. The Court explicitly focused on married couples, reinforcing the idea of sex as only appropriate within a marriage. However, the Griswold case and its establishment of a right to privacy has served as a precedent for many other cases since. It was cited in 1972’s Eisenstadt v. Baird, in which it was determined that unmarried people had the same right to privacy as regarded contraceptives. It was a major element in Roe v. Wade the next year, the decision that overturned state-level abortion bans. More recently, it was seen as a vital link in the chain that assured the legality of homosexual activity in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).
[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/381/479/#tab-opinion-1945663