Griswold v. Connecticut

Connecticut's law dated from 1879, when P. T. Barnum, then a state senator, introduced a bill against contraception. As codified, it punished anyone who used any drug, medicinal article or instrument to prevent conception with a fine of at least $50, 60 days to a year in prison, or both, and a companion statute let anyone who helped be prosecuted as if they were the offender. Birth control groups tried from the 1920s to have it repealed. The law was rarely enforced, but courts turned back challenges to it, among them the Supreme Court in Poe v. Ullman in 1961.

Estelle Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, had helped take women across state lines to New York and Rhode Island for birth control information. With C. Lee Buxton, a physician and professor at Yale Medical School and the league's medical director, she opened a center in New Haven. It ran from 1 to 10 November 1961, giving married people advice on preventing pregnancy and, after examination, prescribing a device or material for the wife. The two were arrested, convicted as accessories and fined $100 each. The prosecution was what they had planned for, a route to challenge the statute.

The Supreme Court decided the case on 7 June 1965, 7 to 2. Justice William O. Douglas wrote for the Court that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras that create zones of privacy, and that marriage lay within one. He asked whether police should be allowed to search marital bedrooms for signs of contraceptive use. Justice Arthur Goldberg, joined by Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice William Brennan, also relied on the Ninth Amendment; Justices John Marshall Harlan and Byron White rested on the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause. Justices Hugo Black and Potter Stewart dissented. Stewart called the law silly but found nothing in the Constitution that forbade it.

The decision covered married couples. On 22 March 1972, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Court struck down a Massachusetts law against giving contraceptives to unmarried people as a denial of equal protection. Justice William Brennan wrote for the Court that the right of privacy belongs to the individual, married or single.