The Limits of <i>Griswold v. Connecticut</i>

My co-panelists have talked extensively about the personal and legal history of Griswold v. Connecticut. I will build on this by looking at the social history of the decision and its impact on the lives of young people like the ones I teach at Central Connecticut State University. In addition to writing about Griswold v. Connecticut, I use this case in my U.S. history classes to illustrate changes in the laws regulating human sexuality. Because I teach in Connecticut, my students are fascinated by this case. They are shocked when they hear that as recently as 1965 it was illegal to use birth control in the state.One key point I bring out when discussing the language of Griswold is the decision only protected the rights of married couples to use contraceptives in “the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms.”1 This opinion was very much in keeping with the family values of the postwar era and the belief that the middle-class home was a zone of privacy that should not be intruded upon by the state. The court's emphasis on the sanctity of the marital bedroom made it difficult to extend the same line of argument to unmarried persons, except within the context of premarital religious counseling. As Marc Stein argues in his book Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe, the Griswold decision “did not recognize a broadly libertarian right to sexual privacy but a narrower right held by married couples only.”2So, in some ways Griswold was innovative and in some ways it was very much a reflection of its era. That is, sex was supposed to be reserved for marriage, and only married couples had the right to privacy when it came to sexual behavior. In fact, many states had laws against fornication, although they were seldom enforced. However, women faced more serious consequences for extramarital intercourse, namely unwed pregnancy and the social stigma of being a single mother.In Connecticut, unmarried women received access to birth control relatively quickly. Immediately following the Griswold decision, the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut (PPLC) opened the New Haven Planned Parenthood clinic. The Yale Daily News reported that the Planned Parenthood clinic would serve any woman over the age of twenty-one (the age of majority at that time), even if she was not married. Although Connecticut did not mandate parental consent for unmarried minors to receive birth control, leaving this up to the discretion of the provider or clinic, Planned Parenthood required single minors have the written consent of a parent in order to receive services.3 The same was true of unmarried minors who sought services at Yale-New Haven Hospital.4After Yale University went coeducational in 1969, the University Health Service (UHS) began offering birth control to incoming students. According to the Health Service's gynecologist, Dr. Phillip Sarrel, “When Yale first started admitting women undergraduates the officials had fantasies that all the young girls descending on campus would get pregnant.” To alleviate these fears, the University hired Dr. Sarrel. They also hired his wife Lorna Sarrel, a social worker, to help him develop a sex counseling service for both female and male students within the Mental Health Division of the UHS.5 The Yale Daily News reported that the purpose of the service was “not to moralize” and that the staff considered the question “are you married” to be irrelevant. At the same time, the paper warned that the service would not function simply as dispensary of birth control devices and prescriptions. Instead, students would “discuss their sexual needs with the Sarrels and various methods of solving their problems.” The Sarrels hoped not only to provide birth control but also “to help students face the tremendous sexual pressures of the college environment.” They were especially concerned that many young women were “getting involved in relationships they don't really want, and are not really ready for, but are getting involved in because of social pressures here.”6 In other words, Sarrel recognized the darker side of the sexual revolution, particularly for young women. This is an issue we are still addressing on college campuses today.Yale was unusual: A survey conducted by the American College Health Association in 1970 indicated that the number of institutions offering contraceptive services was 118.7 Sarrel blamed the lack of campus birth control services on physicians’ tendency to think of contraception for teenagers as “mainly a problem of low socio-economic groups.” He reported that his interviews with students indicated “college students are not promiscuous, but that they are often ignorant and unrealistic about their behavior. Frequently girls refuse to face the fact that they are not ‘immune’ to pregnancy.” He argued that on-campus access to contraception could prevent “real disasters,” such as a girl who may become pregnant from her first sexual exposure.8 Keep in mind that Yale was a wealthy institution worried about affluent young women coming to campus, getting pregnant, and the parents suing the University for negligence. So, the reasons for setting up a birth control service had as much to do with damage control as it did with recognition of the reproductive rights of young unmarried women.Other colleges and universities in the state either lacked the resources or the will to follow suit. For example, when Trinity College started to admit women in 1969, the student health center did not provide gynecological services on campus. Instead, female students consulted with counselors who referred them to Planned Parenthood of Hartford, the Bergdorf Health Center at Hartford Hospital, and private gynecologists.9 Many women students were not satisfied with this arrangement and declared that the lack of reproductive health services on campus was part of larger failure by the college to accommodate the female students. In 1971, a group of female students formed the Trinity Women's Organization. In February 1972, the organization sponsored the first annual Women's Week to bring their concerns to other women and the male majority at the college. According to one of the women's organization's founding members, sophomore Sara Throne, many women “came here feeling like invaders in a foreign land” since no one had done anything to make the campus welcoming to women. Male professors trivialized women's intelligence. There was no gynecologist or woman counselor on campus, no feminist literature in the library, no woman in the athletic department. Instead, said Throne, “We're expected to fit ourselves into what's already here.”10 In order to fully serve the needs of female students, Trinity needed to follow Yale's example by providing gynecological and birth control services on campus. Students eventually were successful and Trinity began offering gynecological services in 1974.11 Gynecologists would prescribe contraceptives but students had to go off campus to have them filled. Still, Trinity was ahead of the University of Connecticut and the state teachers’ colleges, which did not provide any contraceptive services at all, while students complained bitterly that Yale, in contrast, gave out pills “right and left.”12In neighboring Massachusetts, giving contraceptives to unmarried persons was a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. It would not be long before someone would step forward to overtly test Massachusetts’ birth control laws. In the spring of 1967, students from the Boston University (BU) chapter of Students for a Democratic Society invited thirty-four-year-old medical school dropout and contraceptive salesman William R. Baird to give a lecture to students at BU and other area colleges. On April 6, 1967, Baird spoke to over 2,500 people, most of them students, at BU's Hayden Hall. Even students from nearby Boston College, a Catholic institution, “successfully defied threats from the college's dean and turned out in force to listen to Baird's talk.” During the lecture, Baird displayed various contraceptives and gave an unmarried female student a can of Emko contraceptive foam. After the lecture was over, Baird was arrested by the Boston vice squad and charged with “crimes against chastity.”13 Baird won the support of other students throughout the nation, as college students formed the nucleus of those who picketed for Baird's release.14Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Baird's conviction, stating in their ruling Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), “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 fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”15While Baird's appeals were working their way through the court system, students took matters into their own hands by creating advice manuals and student-led sex education classes. At BU, the Student Congress published a “handy guide” on birth control, abortion, and venereal disease as an “act of civil disobedience” against the Boston police. These students worked closely with feminist organizations in Boston and Cambridge. They held public demonstrations defending Baird and demanding reproductive rights for women.16 At nearby Radcliffe College, students complained when they went to the college health service for contraceptive advice and other “female problems, they were made to feel guilty or abnormal.”17 To meet the need for accurate knowledge, students put together their own guide to birth control providers in the Boston area, which served as a model for the feminist classic, Our Bodies, Ourselves.18 Yale students also developed their own self-help guide, entitled Sex and the Yale Student (1970), which they touted as a “Yale pamphlet, by and for Yale students, and centered on our concerns and our questions about human sexuality.”19 During the late 1960s and early 1970s, dozens of other advice manuals appeared on campuses throughout the country, with such flippant titles as Between Your Navel and Your Knees (University of Houston); Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Birth Control But Were Afraid to Ask (Colorado State University); and How to Have Intercourse Without Getting Screwed (University of Washington).20In response to student demands for birth control, Planned Parenthood–World Population initiated a Program of Student Community Action in 1969, and appointed twenty-five-year-old Dan Pellegrom to direct the program. Pellegrom was a recent graduate of the divinity school at Columbia University, where he had served as Student Government President during the infamous strike of 1968. Officials at Planned Parenthood were heartened by the enthusiasm of college students, and tried to cultivate a relationship that would encourage a “free exchange of ideas” and respond to student initiatives rather than dictating to them.21 The organization also tried to be “hip” and used popular culture icons such as Joan Baez to attract students to the College Program.22The College Program also drew upon broader concerns about the “population explosion,” although they intended to expand population concerns beyond the traditional focus on impoverished minorities in the United States and the developing world.23 Planned Parenthood leaders hoped a college program would not only “acquaint college students with the latest contraceptive techniques and devices and provide them with information about availability and accessibility,” and “provide a vehicle” for establishing contraceptive services on college campuses. They also hoped to “motivate college students to have smaller families through the voluntary use of the latest, most effective, and safest contraceptive methods.”24Officials at PP-WF acknowledged that many students, especially men, supported the birth control movement because of concerns about the impact of overpopulation on the environment. The first Earth Day celebration in the United States, held in 1970, made U.S. population limitation a major theme. The group Zero Population Growth (ZPG), founded by biologists concerned about the “catastrophic impacts of ever more human beings on the biosphere,” sponsored teach-ins for college students in April of 1969, which led to the creation of dozens of ZPG college chapters around the country.25 ZPG started a regional group in Connecticut in 1972 in order to lobby for better family planning services in the state and removal of state laws prohibiting abortion. The group actively recruited students at Trinity, University of Connecticut, Connecticut College, and other colleges around the state.26Yet the alliance between birth control advocates and ZPG was an uneasy one. Officials at Planned Parenthood Federation of America were especially cautious about the appeal of ZPG on college campuses. Dan Pellegrom told University of Connecticut biology professor Nancy Clark that, given the controversial nature of ZPG and population groups more generally, it was “essential” that Planned Parenthood provide leadership at the ZPG's teach-ins and use it as a way to increase student interest in forming campus chapters of PPFA. Pellegrom warned of the dangers of affiliating with ZPG, however. Based on his experience working with black community groups, he had “personal problems” with ZPG, “one, because their rhetoric could be taken by the black communities as genocidal and two, because they seem to be often politically in adept.”27Planned Parenthood hoped to use student activism to pressure campus health centers to provide reproductive services to students. In an interview with Glamour magazine in 1970, Pellegrom said “students don't realize their own lobbying strength: They should push for campus birth-control clinics now—while health services are trying to reconsider their Victorian policies.” As a preliminary tactic, Pellegrom advised students to force their university to take a stand on establishing a clinic, acknowledging most positions would probably be negative, e.g. “the college doesn't want to contribute to declining morals.” Pellegrom also advised students to take the position “by denying the health-service doctor the right to dispense contraceptives, [the administration] is interfering with the doctor-patient relationship; then, you can pressure your health service to get going and set up a clinic or at least an open referral policy to direct girls to private doctors.”28In summary, in celebrating what Griswold v. Connecticut did for women's reproductive rights, we need to recognize its limits too. During the 1960s and 1970s, young people played a critical role in expanding these rights to include unmarried as well as married persons. Recently, there have been repeated efforts to undermine access to birth control and abortion, especially for young, single women. It is important to remember earlier strategies used by campus groups so they can inform the work that students are continuing to do for reproductive rights today.