Griswold v. Connecticut 1964
| Author | Daniel Brannen, Richard Hanes, Elizabeth Shaw |
| Pages | 80-84 |
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Appellants: Charles Lee Buxton and Estelle T. Griswold
Appellee: State of Connecticut
Appellants' Claim: That Connecticut's birth control law violated the U.S. Constitution.
Chief Lawyer for Appellants: Thomas I. Emerson
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
Date of Decision: May 11, 1964
Decision: Laws that prevent married couples from using birth control violate marital privacy.
Significance: The U.S. Constitution protects a general right of privacy for Americans.
In 1879, Connecticut passed a law making it a crime for anyone, even married couples, to use birth control drugs or devices. (Birth control prevents a woman from getting pregnant when she has sexual intercourse.) The law also made it a crime to give someone medical information and advice about birth control. Connecticut said it enacted the law to prevent married people from having sexual relations outside marriage.
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Birth control laws became very unpopular among some Americans. Children are expensive to care for. Without birth control, poor people found it difficult to control the size of their families. Women also faced serious health risks and even death from having too many pregnancies or from having abortions when they could not afford another child. (Abortion ends a pregnancy before the fetus, or unborn child, is born.)
Around 1960, several women filed a lawsuit to challenge Connecticut's law. They said they needed to use birth control for health reasons, but could be convicted for doing so. The courts in Connecticut ruled against the women, so they appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In Poe v. Ullman (1961), the Supreme Court decided not to decide the case. It said Connecticut's law was "dead words" and "harmless empty shadows" because Connecticut never tried to enforce it. Justice John Marshall Harlan II wrote a dissenting opinion, saying he believed the Court should strike down the law. Harlan foreshadowed what the Court would do a few years later in Griswold by saying the law was an "unjustifiable invasion of privacy."
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Estelle T. Griswold was executive director of...
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