Appellants
Charles Lee Buxton, Estelle T. Griswold
Appellee
State of Connecticut
Appellants' Claim
That Connecticut's birth-control laws violated its citizens' constitutional rights.
Chief Lawyers for Appellants
Tom Emerson, Fowler Harper, Harriet Pilpel, Catherine Roraback
Chief Lawyer for Appellee
Joseph B. Clark
Justices for the Court
William J. Brennan, Jr., Tom C. Clark, William O. Douglas (writing for the Court), Arthur Goldberg, John Marshall Harlan II, Earl Warren, Byron R. White
Justices Dissenting
Hugo Lafayette Black, Potter Stewart
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
11 May 1964
Decision
Reversed Griswold's and Buxton's lower court convictions for providing contraceptive information to married couples and struck down all state laws forbidding the use of contraceptives by such couples.
Significance
The decision articulated a constitutional "right to privacy," which would later be interpreted as protecting the right of unmarried persons to use birth control inEisenstadt v. Baird (1972), and the right of women to terminate their pregnancies in Roe v. Wade (1973).
Connecticut's anti-contraceptive law, passed in 1879, was simple and unambiguous:
The Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut first brought the law before theU.S. Supreme Court in 1942, with a physician as appellant. The Court ruled that the doctor lacked standing to sue, since his patients--and not he--suffered injury due to his inability to legally prescribe birth control. In June of1961, declining to rule in a suit brought by several women, the Supreme Court called the normally unenforced law "dead words" and "harmless empty shadows." Estelle T. Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and Dr. C. Lee Buxton, chairman of Yale University's obstetrics department, decided to test the "death" of the 1879 law: On 1 November 1961, they opened a birth-control clinic in New Haven. Dr. Buxton cited the Junedecision and explained to the press: "This leads me to believe that all doctors in Connecticut may now prescribe child spacing techniques to married womenwhen it is medically indicated."
1879 Law Alive and Well
Griswold and Buxton were arrested and their center closed on 10 November 1961. On 8 December 1961, the opening day of the Sixth Circuit Court trial, defense attorney Catherine G. Roraback argued that Connecticut's birth-control lawviolated their clients' constitutional right to freedom of speech. Judge J.Robert Lacey, saying he wished to study the defense's brief, continued the case indefinitely.
On 2 January 1962, the trial took place. It lasted only six hours. Julius Martez was the Sixth Circuit Court prosecutor who had requested warrants for Griswold's and Buxton's arrests. He now called his witnesses. John A. Blasi, a New Haven police detective who had entered the clinic on its third day of operation, testified that six women were in the waiting room at the time; that Estelle Griswold freely told him that the facility was, indeed, a birth-controlclinic; and that Griswold had offered him contraceptive information and devices. Another detective offered similar testimony.
Dr. Buxton testified that he and his medical colleagues believed that "this type of advice" played a crucial part in women's health care.
Prosecutor Martez said that Griswold and Buxton had broken the law and that the Connecticut legislature, not the court, was the proper forum for anyone objecting to the 82-year-old statute.
Judge Lacey agreed with Martez. He described the statute as "absolute," and he emphasized that it had been upheld three times by the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors. Rejecting defense attorney Catherine Roraback's free speech argument, he characterized the prohibition of a physician's prescription of birth-control devices as a "constitutional exercise of the police powers of theState of Connecticut." Griswold and Buxton were then convicted of violatingConnecticut's birth control law, and each was fined $100.00.
Ten days later, defense attorneys Roraback and Harriet Pilpel filed their clients' appeal with the Appellate Division of the Sixth Connecticut Circuit Court. A three-judge panel heard the case 19 October 1962 and upheld Griswold'sand Buxton's convictions on 18 January 1963. However, citing questions "of great public importance," it certified the case for a review by the State Supreme Court of Errors.
That court upheld the convictions on 11 May 1964. Associate Justice John Comley's opinion declared: "We adhere to the principle that courts may not interfere with the exercise by a state of the police power to conserve the public safety and welfare, including health and morals."
On to the Supreme Court
The first action Planned Parenthood took in preparing Griswold v. Connecticut for the U.S. Supreme Court was to replace its female attorneys, Roraback and Pilpel, with two male attorneys: Fowler Harper and, upon his death, Thomas I. Emerson, both professors at Yale Law School.
Oral argument began before the Supreme Court on 29 March 1964. Ethel Kennedy(wife of Senator Robert F. Kennedy) and Joan Kennedy (wife of Senator EdwardKennedy), both Catholic and with 11 children between them, were in the audience.
Emerson argued that Connecticut's birth-control law deprived his clients andtheir clinic's patients of the First Amendment right to free speech and of their right to liberty, which according to the Fourteenth Amendment, could notbe abridged without "due process of law." Moreover, he claimed that his clients had a right to privacy, which was guaranteed by the Ninth Amendment to theConstitution: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shallnot be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Emerson characterized the Connecticut law as an effort to erect "a principleof morality" by declaring it "immoral to use contraceptives even within the married relationship." This was, he continued, a "moral judgment" that did not"conform to current community standards."
Both Emerson and Connecticut's attorney, Thomas Clark, were questioned aboutthe presumed "under-the-counter" availability of birth-control devices in Connecticut. Clark classified it with clandestine bookmaking on racehorses--available, but not in the open. Emerson said the devices were simply termed "feminine hygiene" items. Clark was then asked whether it was permissible to prescribe contraceptives to prevent the spread of disease. Clark called this a "ludicrous argument" and explained that sexually transmitted disease was not present in married couples, who were claimed as clients of the Planned Parenthood clinic. As the New York Times summarized Clark's reasoning, "Connecticut requires applicants for marriage licenses to take venereal disease tests, and . . . Connecticut also has laws against fornication and adultery. Thus, [Clark] indicated, there would be no reason to believe that any such disease would spread."
The next day, Justice Stewart asked Clark to explain the purpose of the statute. "To reduce the chances of immorality," he said. "To act as a deterrent tosexual intercourse outside marriage."
Justice Stewart replied, "The trouble with that argument is that on this record it [the clinic] involves only married women."
A little later in the questioning, Clark declared that Connecticut had the right to guarantee its own "continuity" by prohibiting contraceptives.
Justice Goldberg returned to the statute's alleged role in preventing intercourse outside of marriage, and he asked why Connecticut's laws banning fornication and adultery were not sufficient. Clark replied that "it's easier to control the problem" with the addition of anti-birth control laws.
Decision Reverses Convictions
The Supreme Court, in a 7-2 ruling, reversed Griswold's and Buxton's convictions, invalidated the 1879 law, and enunciated a constitutional "right to privacy." The majority opinion, written by Justice Douglas, declared that the "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanationsfrom those guarantees that help give them life and substance" and cited the Constitution's First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments.The Ninth Amendment, Douglas quoted in its entirety: "The enumeration in theConstitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparageothers retained by the people." The enforcement of the Connecticut birth-control law would require gross violation of privacy, which was presumably a right "retained by the people." "Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives?" Douglas asked. He characterized such action as "repulsive to the notions ofprivacy surrounding the marriage relationship" and reversed the lower courtconvictions.
Justices Black and Stewart issued dissenting opinions. Black wrote:
Griswold Applied Outside the Marital Bedroom
Before Griswold, the Ninth Amendment had usually been interpreted as reserving to the state government any right not specifically granted to the federal government; Douglas' literal interpretation, that the Ninth Amendment reserved such rights to the people, formed the basis of two other successful challenges to state reproduction laws.
In Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), single people won the right to purchaseand use contraceptives. Justice Brennan, a concurring justice in Griswold, delivered the majority opinion:
The following year, in its controversial Roe v. Wade decision, the Court held that the "right of privacy . . . is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."
Related Cases
The Right to Privacy
Since Griswold and, even more significant, Roe v. Wade (1973),it has been commonplace to refer to a "right to privacy." But just as peopletend to erroneously attribute to the Bible statements such as "The Lord helpsthem that help themselves," there is no reference to a "right to privacy" inthe Constitution. Nonetheless, many would say that the above expression is consistent with the Bible, and likewise the idea of a right to privacy is certainly consistent with the Constitution.
Using Griswold as their model, Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, legal counsel for the petitioner in Roe, based their argument on the ideathat the Ninth Amendment offers a protection of "the right to privacy" in itsreservation for the people of all rights not otherwise enumerated. The actual location of this right in the Constitution may have been problematic, Justice Harry Blackmun suggested when he delivered the Court's opinion, but the existence of the right itself was not: "This right of privacy, whether it be found in the Fourteenth Amendment's conception of personal liberty and restrictions on state action . . . or . . . in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough . . . "
Sources
Garrow, David J. Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. New York: Macmillan, 1994.
Charles Lee Buxton, Estelle T. Griswold
Appellee
State of Connecticut
Appellants' Claim
That Connecticut's birth-control laws violated its citizens' constitutional rights.
Chief Lawyers for Appellants
Tom Emerson, Fowler Harper, Harriet Pilpel, Catherine Roraback
Chief Lawyer for Appellee
Joseph B. Clark
Justices for the Court
William J. Brennan, Jr., Tom C. Clark, William O. Douglas (writing for the Court), Arthur Goldberg, John Marshall Harlan II, Earl Warren, Byron R. White
Justices Dissenting
Hugo Lafayette Black, Potter Stewart
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
11 May 1964
Decision
Reversed Griswold's and Buxton's lower court convictions for providing contraceptive information to married couples and struck down all state laws forbidding the use of contraceptives by such couples.
Significance
The decision articulated a constitutional "right to privacy," which would later be interpreted as protecting the right of unmarried persons to use birth control inEisenstadt v. Baird (1972), and the right of women to terminate their pregnancies in Roe v. Wade (1973).
Connecticut's anti-contraceptive law, passed in 1879, was simple and unambiguous:
Any person who uses any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception shall be fined not less than fiftydollars or imprisoned not less than sixty days nor more than one year or beboth fined and imprisoned. (General Statutes of Connecticut, Section 53--32.)
Any person who assists, abets, counsels, causes, hires or commands another to commit any offense may be prosecuted and punished as if he werethe principal offender. (Section 54--196.)
The Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut first brought the law before theU.S. Supreme Court in 1942, with a physician as appellant. The Court ruled that the doctor lacked standing to sue, since his patients--and not he--suffered injury due to his inability to legally prescribe birth control. In June of1961, declining to rule in a suit brought by several women, the Supreme Court called the normally unenforced law "dead words" and "harmless empty shadows." Estelle T. Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and Dr. C. Lee Buxton, chairman of Yale University's obstetrics department, decided to test the "death" of the 1879 law: On 1 November 1961, they opened a birth-control clinic in New Haven. Dr. Buxton cited the Junedecision and explained to the press: "This leads me to believe that all doctors in Connecticut may now prescribe child spacing techniques to married womenwhen it is medically indicated."
1879 Law Alive and Well
Griswold and Buxton were arrested and their center closed on 10 November 1961. On 8 December 1961, the opening day of the Sixth Circuit Court trial, defense attorney Catherine G. Roraback argued that Connecticut's birth-control lawviolated their clients' constitutional right to freedom of speech. Judge J.Robert Lacey, saying he wished to study the defense's brief, continued the case indefinitely.
On 2 January 1962, the trial took place. It lasted only six hours. Julius Martez was the Sixth Circuit Court prosecutor who had requested warrants for Griswold's and Buxton's arrests. He now called his witnesses. John A. Blasi, a New Haven police detective who had entered the clinic on its third day of operation, testified that six women were in the waiting room at the time; that Estelle Griswold freely told him that the facility was, indeed, a birth-controlclinic; and that Griswold had offered him contraceptive information and devices. Another detective offered similar testimony.
Dr. Buxton testified that he and his medical colleagues believed that "this type of advice" played a crucial part in women's health care.
Prosecutor Martez said that Griswold and Buxton had broken the law and that the Connecticut legislature, not the court, was the proper forum for anyone objecting to the 82-year-old statute.
Judge Lacey agreed with Martez. He described the statute as "absolute," and he emphasized that it had been upheld three times by the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors. Rejecting defense attorney Catherine Roraback's free speech argument, he characterized the prohibition of a physician's prescription of birth-control devices as a "constitutional exercise of the police powers of theState of Connecticut." Griswold and Buxton were then convicted of violatingConnecticut's birth control law, and each was fined $100.00.
Ten days later, defense attorneys Roraback and Harriet Pilpel filed their clients' appeal with the Appellate Division of the Sixth Connecticut Circuit Court. A three-judge panel heard the case 19 October 1962 and upheld Griswold'sand Buxton's convictions on 18 January 1963. However, citing questions "of great public importance," it certified the case for a review by the State Supreme Court of Errors.
That court upheld the convictions on 11 May 1964. Associate Justice John Comley's opinion declared: "We adhere to the principle that courts may not interfere with the exercise by a state of the police power to conserve the public safety and welfare, including health and morals."
On to the Supreme Court
The first action Planned Parenthood took in preparing Griswold v. Connecticut for the U.S. Supreme Court was to replace its female attorneys, Roraback and Pilpel, with two male attorneys: Fowler Harper and, upon his death, Thomas I. Emerson, both professors at Yale Law School.
Oral argument began before the Supreme Court on 29 March 1964. Ethel Kennedy(wife of Senator Robert F. Kennedy) and Joan Kennedy (wife of Senator EdwardKennedy), both Catholic and with 11 children between them, were in the audience.
Emerson argued that Connecticut's birth-control law deprived his clients andtheir clinic's patients of the First Amendment right to free speech and of their right to liberty, which according to the Fourteenth Amendment, could notbe abridged without "due process of law." Moreover, he claimed that his clients had a right to privacy, which was guaranteed by the Ninth Amendment to theConstitution: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shallnot be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Emerson characterized the Connecticut law as an effort to erect "a principleof morality" by declaring it "immoral to use contraceptives even within the married relationship." This was, he continued, a "moral judgment" that did not"conform to current community standards."
Both Emerson and Connecticut's attorney, Thomas Clark, were questioned aboutthe presumed "under-the-counter" availability of birth-control devices in Connecticut. Clark classified it with clandestine bookmaking on racehorses--available, but not in the open. Emerson said the devices were simply termed "feminine hygiene" items. Clark was then asked whether it was permissible to prescribe contraceptives to prevent the spread of disease. Clark called this a "ludicrous argument" and explained that sexually transmitted disease was not present in married couples, who were claimed as clients of the Planned Parenthood clinic. As the New York Times summarized Clark's reasoning, "Connecticut requires applicants for marriage licenses to take venereal disease tests, and . . . Connecticut also has laws against fornication and adultery. Thus, [Clark] indicated, there would be no reason to believe that any such disease would spread."
The next day, Justice Stewart asked Clark to explain the purpose of the statute. "To reduce the chances of immorality," he said. "To act as a deterrent tosexual intercourse outside marriage."
Justice Stewart replied, "The trouble with that argument is that on this record it [the clinic] involves only married women."
A little later in the questioning, Clark declared that Connecticut had the right to guarantee its own "continuity" by prohibiting contraceptives.
Justice Goldberg returned to the statute's alleged role in preventing intercourse outside of marriage, and he asked why Connecticut's laws banning fornication and adultery were not sufficient. Clark replied that "it's easier to control the problem" with the addition of anti-birth control laws.
Decision Reverses Convictions
The Supreme Court, in a 7-2 ruling, reversed Griswold's and Buxton's convictions, invalidated the 1879 law, and enunciated a constitutional "right to privacy." The majority opinion, written by Justice Douglas, declared that the "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanationsfrom those guarantees that help give them life and substance" and cited the Constitution's First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments.The Ninth Amendment, Douglas quoted in its entirety: "The enumeration in theConstitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparageothers retained by the people." The enforcement of the Connecticut birth-control law would require gross violation of privacy, which was presumably a right "retained by the people." "Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives?" Douglas asked. He characterized such action as "repulsive to the notions ofprivacy surrounding the marriage relationship" and reversed the lower courtconvictions.
Justices Black and Stewart issued dissenting opinions. Black wrote:
The Court talks about a constitutional "right of privacy" as though there is some constitutional provision or provisions forbidding any law ever to be passed which might abridge the "privacy" of individuals. But there is not . .. I cannot rely on the Due Process Clause [of the Fourteenth Amendment] or the Ninth Amendment or any mysterious and uncertain natural law concept as a reason for striking down this state law.
Griswold Applied Outside the Marital Bedroom
Before Griswold, the Ninth Amendment had usually been interpreted as reserving to the state government any right not specifically granted to the federal government; Douglas' literal interpretation, that the Ninth Amendment reserved such rights to the people, formed the basis of two other successful challenges to state reproduction laws.
In Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), single people won the right to purchaseand use contraceptives. Justice Brennan, a concurring justice in Griswold, delivered the majority opinion:
If under Griswold the distribution of contraceptives to married persons cannot be prohibited, a ban on distribution to unmarried persons would be equally impermissible. It istrue that in Griswold the right of privacy in question inhered in themarital relationship. Yet the marital couple is not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own, but an association of two individuals each with a separate intellectual and emotional makeup. If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentallyaffecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.
The following year, in its controversial Roe v. Wade decision, the Court held that the "right of privacy . . . is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."
Related Cases
- Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1906).
- Truax v. Raich, 239 U.S. 33 (1915).
- Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923).
- Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925).
- West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937).
- Adler v. Board of Education, 342 U.S. 485 (1952).
- NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449 (1958).
- NAACP v. Button, 371 U.S. 415 (1963).
The Right to Privacy
Since Griswold and, even more significant, Roe v. Wade (1973),it has been commonplace to refer to a "right to privacy." But just as peopletend to erroneously attribute to the Bible statements such as "The Lord helpsthem that help themselves," there is no reference to a "right to privacy" inthe Constitution. Nonetheless, many would say that the above expression is consistent with the Bible, and likewise the idea of a right to privacy is certainly consistent with the Constitution.
Using Griswold as their model, Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, legal counsel for the petitioner in Roe, based their argument on the ideathat the Ninth Amendment offers a protection of "the right to privacy" in itsreservation for the people of all rights not otherwise enumerated. The actual location of this right in the Constitution may have been problematic, Justice Harry Blackmun suggested when he delivered the Court's opinion, but the existence of the right itself was not: "This right of privacy, whether it be found in the Fourteenth Amendment's conception of personal liberty and restrictions on state action . . . or . . . in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough . . . "
Sources
Garrow, David J. Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. New York: Macmillan, 1994.
User Comments Add a comment…