Griswold v. Connecticut

BACKGROUND: By the 1960's contraceptive methods were prescribed and sold in most states. However, Connecticut's own Comstock law of 1879 still prevented women in that state from obtaining or using birth control. Neither the legislature nor the state's highest court would overturn the law, the court's reasoning being that women had a "workable alternative" to contraception - abstention from sex.

THE CASE: Estelle Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, convinced her board of directors to support a direct challenge to Connecticut's Comstock law.

In 1961 Griswold and Dr. Charles Lee Buxton, chairman of the Yale School of Medicine Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, opened a birth control clinic in New Haven. They served crowds of women before being arrested by the police.

The case was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1965. Justice William O. Douglas wrote the majority opinion:

"We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights - older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together, for better or for worse, hopefully enduring and intimate to the degree of being sacred."

The state, Douglas concluded, was constitutionally barred from interfering with a married couple's decision about childbearing.

IMPACT: The immediate impact of the decision was to enable married women in Connecticut to get contraceptive services.

More importantly, it identified a constitutional right of privacy that no state could violate. In this way Griswold barred family planning opponents from imposing legal restrictions on access to services in the future, and it laid the ground for affirming the right to safe and legal abortion.

SOURCE:

A Tradition of Choice: Planned Parenthood at 75. Copyright 1991, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc.

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