Being There: Informal Comments on <i>Griswold</i>

My title, “Being There,” means being “here” in New Haven, Connecticut in the early 1960s and playing a small, if emotion-packed role in the case that became famous as Griswold v Connecticut. In 1962, at the age of twenty-six, new to both marriage and immigration to the United States, I was one of the three witnesses for the trial in New Haven (State of Connecticut v Estelle T. Griswold and C. Lee Buxton), the case that rose to the Supreme Court of the United States after confirmation of the convictions of Griswold and Buxton by Connecticut's appellate court. Two other witnesses testified against Mrs. Griswold, the determined reformer who was executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, for giving advice to clients and the means to practice birth control, and thus breaking the then-existing law. I was the sole witness against Griswold's co-defendant, Dr. C. Lee Buxton, chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Yale. Buxton was a passionate supporter of birth control on medical grounds as well as more generally—notably for a woman to be able to avoid becoming pregnant or going through childbirth when doing so would damage her health and might even lead to death.Describing my role as a witness in events that happened more than fifty years ago puts me in a strange predicament as a historian, because I must draw on my own memories as well as scholarly sources; and as we all know, memories are fickle. That said, I will give three “takes” on this experience: first, giving a brief background to the case as seen at the time; second, relating my observations as a witness; and third, asking a basic historical question: If we were suddenly transported back to New Haven in the early 1960s and trying to make sense of the case as it was taking place, what might we conclude?The case did not come out of the blue. Griswold, Buxton, and others had been trying to overturn the law of 1879 for some time. It was true, as members of the Supreme Court had argued, that the law was not being observed. Police did not track what happened in private doctors’ offices. Outside of medical clinics (including Dr. Buxton's), the law could be ignored, and it was, by many if not most doctors in the state. Condoms and other birth control aids were available in drugstores for individuals who knew what they wanted, with condoms safeguarded by the fiction that these were sold for health reasons. For women who had no idea where to turn for advice, there was little or no advice available. Estelle Griswold organized a referral service (with transportation) to take patients over state lines to the Planned Parenthood clinic in Eastern Westchester, New York. That there was a need for this was ridiculous. My primary observation at the time was that the situation was hypocritical, grossly unfair, and represented rationing by social class. No one was forcing women to accept contraception. The coercion was to keep them from it. Some women no doubt feared the wrath of husbands (or husbands feared the disapproval or ridicule of workmates) if they made unusually visible efforts to get what they wanted by traveling out of state.The motives for Buxton and Griswold to set up a birth control clinic at 79 Trumbull Street, New Haven were quite clear. The goal was to have this clinic shut down by police or other legal action as proof that the law was in effect. Witnesses were necessary to the case to show in court that married women had been to the clinic, accepted advice and/or products there from a doctor and/or social worker for the purpose of birth control, and subsequently committed the crime of using contraceptives. Griswold and Buxton were prosecuted as accessories. Limiting the challenge to “married women” focused on the problem at hand, and avoided larger and more fractious debates about sexual freedom.1The birth control clinic was opened on November 1, 1961 and closed after a police visit (hardly a “raid”) on November 10. This allowed some time for Griswold and Buxton to collect and identify patients who might be willing to act as witnesses. The first witness was Joan Bates Forsberg, an exemplar of family planning. She had three children and now, with Griswold's advice, she chose the new contraceptive pill. However, she had not seen Dr. Buxton on her visit and thus could not testify against him when the test case was brought to trial. And that is where I came in.This was November 1961. I had arrived in the United States the previous January, a newly married immigrant from England carrying a Green Card, and enrolled as a first-year graduate student for a Master's Degree in Public Health at Yale. Like other assimilating immigrants, I was learning as fast as possible about American customs, Yale customs, and how best to fit in. I had been the administrator of a National Health Service (NHS) hospital in London and had done two years of graduate work in England in health policy and administration, but lacked American-based training and a U.S. credential. On the face of it, I seemed an unlikely candidate as a witness for this case. Notably, I had not been involved in birth control advocacy, which was not a burning issue “across the pond.” To me, the Griswold case seemed more a matter of commonsense than principle. Being part of it was no more peculiar than sitting in a lecture room at Yale and hearing about the byzantine, inexplicable organization of the American health care system, which everyone seemed to take for granted.Apart from being a newcomer to the scene, two factors made me a good choice. The first was that it was difficult to find women who would testify publicly with the support of their husbands in the tense, religion-saturated, sexist and finger-pointing climate of the day. Second, I was at hand. An English accent also probably helped. Social and professional connections were the impelling force. My then husband, Robert B. Stevens, was a professor at the Yale Law School, and I was thus associated with the school as a faculty wife. (Those were the dinner-party days). The Law School was an exciting, vibrant place. I had met and liked Fowler V. Harper, a senior faculty member who was the driving legal force behind the case. Fowler asked Robert if I might be willing to be a witness. According to historian David Garrow, we “had impressed Harper at dinner parties as a young couple of sufficient moxie” to do it.2 Would we/I be willing to go to Lee Buxton, get birth control advice, and report Buxton to the police? I embarked on a busy day (November 9, the day before the clinic closed down—time was short): off to the clinic to check the diaphragm I had had fitted in England a year or so earlier and to acquire a tube of Ortho-Gynol jelly from Mrs. Griswold (I paid $15). From there we went to the New Haven police station, where we were expected, but were sent home with somewhat red faces to have intercourse, i.e. to commit the crime.The next day back we went to the police station. The first witness, Joan Forsberg, had already given her statement. I remember giving my statement to Detective John A. Blazi, in the presence of Lieutenant Mae Gilhuly on November 10, 1961. Though there was a climate of hostility against contraception in many quarters, Detective Blazi was a helpful companion in composing my script. Together we explained that my husband and I were delaying pregnancy until after my graduate education—we had been married less than a year.At the end the detective asked “Wouldn't you like to say something about the rights of women, Mrs. Stevens?” This was unexpected, but I rose to the occasion: “This opportunity should be made available to all women in this state.” Blazi: “Don't you mean married women, Mrs. Stevens?” I signed the document as such, later regretting the limitation as a mark of weakness. But in fact he was right. Since the focus of the case was on married women, saying so was the desired response for the purposes of the trial. Joan Forsburg was more canny, going into history with the phrase, “I shall be very happy to see the time when information about birth control is legally made available to all married women in this state.”3Marie Wilson Tindall was the third witness: thirty-seven, African-American, married to a social worker. She too, had visited the clinic. She too made a statement to the police and surrendered a diaphragm and tube of jelly. I, too, as requested, handed my partly used tube of jelly to the police as evidence.4Proceedings for the trial rolled along. A short hearing without witnesses took place on November 24, 1961, in which Griswold and Buxton pied not guilty. My next, and final, appearance was at the non-jury trial, State of Connecticut v. Estelle T. Griswold and C Lee Buxton, on January 2, 1962, when both were declared guilty (each fined $100), thus launching the process of appeals.I was questioned quite briefly at the trial. The mood as I remember it was quite cheerful. All that was needed were basic facts. Yes, I had been to the clinic. I had received birth control advice from Dr. Buxton. I had bought a tube of Ortho-Gynol jelly at the suggestion of Mrs. Griswold. My husband and I had used it for contraceptive purposes. I had surrendered the tube of jelly to the police. The crimped, partly used tube was produced by the police in court, with a straight-faced description: “When squeezed it has the consistency of shaving soap.” When asked if this was the tube I had been given I was as cautious as I thought a Law School affiliate should be: “It looks like it.” That was enough. I'd done my bit.Though there was a stage character to the trial—the case was staged, after all—I do not want to make light of these experiences. The halls were crowded outside the courtroom. The strong religious overtones of the issue were not confined to leaders of the Roman Catholic Church or parishioners unwilling to stick out their necks. Debates about the religious and ethical propriety of birth control took place in the halls I frequented at Yale's Department (now School) of Public Health. When did life begin? If birth control were legal (as it then was in all other U.S. states except Massachusetts), what about abortion? Was there a slippery slope here? If you believed abstinence was the “natural law” and sex was for procreation (period), it was easy to understand the view of James Morris, the original complainer in support of the Connecticut law, whether or not one agreed with him: “I think that a Planned Parenthood Center is like a house of prostitution.”5It is not clear what we might think as a group if we were suddenly transported back to New Haven in 1961 and 1962. My husband Robert was immediately concerned that his wife was standing up in court admitting to committing a crime in the state of Connecticut, which could be viewed as falling within the definition of “moral turpitude.” Could I be deported? He was on an exchange visitor visa, but expected to come back as an immigrant after a required two years away. (Immigration quotas of the time strongly favored northern Europeans, so that for him, as for me, the visa was not difficult to get.) Would this crime affect my future citizenship? This was worked through by the lawyers. I had become fond of a popular TV show about a preternaturally successful (fictional) lawyer called Perry Mason, and quite seriously imagined someone saying, “Time for a deal with the D.A.” The point was real, because the essential crime, using contraception, was admitted in court by all three witnesses, with the complicity of husbands, though none of us was charged. Finally, on January 7, 1963, the appellate court in Connecticut ruled that it was not necessary to prosecute, let alone convict the three married women witnesses who had testified at the trial in order for Griswold and Buxton to be convicted for aiding and abetting. This was an odd ruling in its way, but definitely convenient. I became a U.S. citizen proudly in 1968.The legal victory in Griswold v Connecticut was to rest on the constitutional principle of privacy, but down in the trenches privacy was a rather vague concept in the early 1960s. Freedom was easier to understand, as was the liberation of sex from the single goal of procreation. “Privacy” was far less gripping as a popular rallying cry than cleaning up vice or proclaiming solid religious principles, or the right to walk through the front door of a birth control clinic and be welcomed. But what did it mean? Did marital privacy mean a harmonious 50–50 decision about birth control between husband and wife? Would a married woman be free to practice contraception unilaterally (a women's issue)? What about the procreative rights of married men? Or unmarried men and women? The passions displayed over birth control I remember in Connecticut in the early 1960s were not unlike those of abortion debates today. Each side held strong beliefs. There were questions of choice and of life, different views of where moral authority should be vested, and how far can (and should) law regulate human behavior. How far in a democracy should the beliefs of one influential group in a community affect the laws of everyone? Should religious belief trump moral values held by non-believers? What happens when state and federal law conflict? The questions continue. There are often no simple answers, now as then.As I found in my salad days as a new immigrant, disagreement is a fundamental aspect of American democracy, resolution difficult, and compromise essential. Griswold v. Connecticut, neither perfect nor imperfect in itself, provided a point of resolution along the road to reproductive rights. I feel privileged to have played a role in it.