Griswold v. Connecticut

An 1879 Connecticut law made it a crime for anyone, married or not, to use any drug or device to prevent conception, and to help anyone else do so. It was rarely enforced against individuals, but it kept birth control clinics closed. Earlier challenges had failed for lack of a real prosecution. In November 1961 Estelle Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and Dr. C. Lee Buxton of Yale opened a clinic in New Haven to force one. They were arrested within days and fined one hundred dollars each.

On June 7, 1965, the Supreme Court struck the law down seven to two. Justice William O. Douglas found no single clause that protected the right in question. Instead he argued that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees, that create zones of privacy. The marriage relationship lay within one of them, and the idea of police searching marital bedrooms for signs of contraceptives was repulsive to it.

Other justices in the majority grounded the right in the Ninth Amendment or in the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause. Justices Hugo Black and Potter Stewart dissented. Stewart called it an uncommonly silly law that he would vote against as a legislator, but said he could find no general right of privacy in the Constitution.

The Court extended the ruling to unmarried people in Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972 and built on it in Roe v. Wade the next year. That lineage made Griswold a battleground. When the Court overruled Roe in 2022, the majority said other privacy precedents were not in question, while Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately that the Court should reconsider the reasoning behind Griswold as well. Congress responded with legislation protecting contraception, which passed the House but stalled in the Senate.