July 01, 2005

The right for women to obtain birth control is at stake with the departure of Sandra Day O'Connor from the Supreme Court

From Ellen Chesler in Ms.:

The landmark ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut paved the way for Eisenstadt v. Baird, the 1972 Supreme Court decision that extended these same privacy protections — and thus the right to obtain birth control — to unmarried women. ... The Griswold v. Connecticut decision protects the right of married women to practice contraception and to secure access to legal and reliable reproductive-health services. It later provided the foundation for expanding privacy protections to encompass abortion. And those are two of the critical protections now endangered by the potential change of just one justice in the U.S. Supreme Court.

The story of Griswold begins in 1961, when Estelle, then executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and Dr. C. Lee Buxton of Yale University’s Medical School opened a small birth-control clinic in downtown New Haven, Conn. They intended to challenge the validity of the state’s official ban on birth control, and indeed, nine days later, they were arrested for dispensing contraceptives to a married couple. A month later they were convicted and fined $100 each.

When their case finally reached the Supreme Court, seven of nine justices agreed that a zone of privacy safeguarding birth control inheres in what Justice William O. Douglas called a “penumbra” (a shaded rim between darkness and light) of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. (Other justices felt it was covered by protections against search and seizure and other specific rights that could logically be extended to cover marriage.)

In other words, although the Constitution and the Bill of Rights do not explicitly guarantee privacy rights to individuals, such rights are implicit within the documents. The landmark ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut paved the way for Eisenstadt v. Baird, the 1972 Supreme Court decision that extended these same privacy protections — and thus the right to obtain birth control — to unmarried women. It opened the door the following year to the historic ruling in Roe v. Wade, which expanded the privacy doctrine to abortion, granting women and their doctors the legal right not just to prevent, but also to terminate, unwanted early pregnancies.

Just two years ago, the Court once again drew upon the Griswold doctrine of privacy, in the 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas, to protect the right of consensual homosexual relations. With social conservatives again ascendant across the land — and an intense battle looming over possible Supreme Court vacancies — Griswold’s 40th anniversary this year compels us to remember just how long and hard American progressives have battled to secure reproductive-health rights in this country.

It reminds us, as well, how much is at stake today as conservatives challenge our long-protected freedoms under the rubric of trying to prevent abortions, and hurl allegations of “judicial activism” at judges with whose decisions they disagree...

So much is at stake. Before birth control and abortion were legally and readily available, the average woman would become pregnant between 12 and 15 times in her lifetime. Even today in the United States, nearly half of all pregnancies remain unintended, and nearly half of those result in abortion. This is why polls show that the vast majority of Americans reject the extremism of a determined minority and do not want the Supreme Court decisions that protect their private decisions to be overturned.

Doctrines of privacy and equality for women are simply not separable: Eroding one imperils the other.

And all this rests on the shoulders of just one new justice.



"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song." ~ Maya Angelou

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