June 7, 1965: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that privacy was a right protected by the Constitution. More specifically, the court held: “A right to privacy can be inferred from several amendments in the Bill of Rights, and this right prevents states from making the use of contraception by married couples illegal.” As legal scholar John W. Johnson emphasizes, “It is no exaggeration to say that Griswold changed the course of American constitutional law. In addition, the Griswold decision continues into the twenty-first century to set the agenda for debates about privacy in American life and how the nation’s founding document should be interpreted.” The case was brought by Estelle Griswold, the executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut (PPLC). When she joined the organization in 1953, she quickly discovered that an 1879 statute made their work challenging by criminalizing contraceptives. Together with a medical director and law professor from Yale, she set out to challenge the anticontraception law. The case remade the relationship between individual Americans and the government, separating many intimate and family decisions from state regulation.
Citations: John W. Johnson, Griswold v. Connecticut: Birth Control and the Constitutional Right of Privacy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 1-2, 4, https://archive.org/details/griswoldvconnect0000john_k5q9; “Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965),” Justia Law, June 7, 1965, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/381/479/; U.S. Supreme Court, “Concurring Opinion of Justice Goldberg and Chief Justice Brennan,” June 1965, NAID: 26283938, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/26283938.
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