Griswold Vs Connecticut

JOHN BOGERT: The Pill continues to stir controversy

It was 1963 or maybe 1964. I can't be exact because even big news traveled slowly back then.

But there I was sitting in the back seat of a car driven by another kid's college-age brother. A student at a New England engineer school, he had been, only a year before, the very essence of the high school geek.

Only now he was full of college airs and talking about his girlfriend. They were, he claimed, having the kind of frequent sex only dreamed of by the newly minted teens riding in the big Ford's wide back seat.

There were three of us back there. One was a "nice girl" named Connie, nice girls being what we called, well, nice girls ... if you catch my drift.

There were several reasons for Connie to maintain her niceness, the foremost having to do with acquiring what was known as a "bad reputation." That and unplanned pregnancy, a notorious condition directly related to a lack of dependable contraception, which was limited in our small world to condoms sold out of a vending machine in the men's room of Pizzio's Hoagy House.

These condoms were the descendents of what was once seen as a huge breakthrough in preventing pregnancies. That little-recalled marvel was the invention of Charles Goodyear, the tire guy, who in 1839 began producing rubber condoms as thick as footwear. More than a century later that's still pretty much what we had. That and girls who were born saying no.

Now here we were listening to an older brother spinning for a back-seat audience the tale of a magic pill that could prevent women from having babies.

Naturally, he had to explain things like ovulation to us. But I'm certain he didn't know that this same pill had been around since Frank Colton and Gregory Pincus contrived it in 1957 for gynecological disorders.

It had, in fact, been approved for general use in 1960. Three or four years later, with 1.2 million women on the stuff, we were just hearing about Anthony Comstock's worst nightmare.

Reading Between the Rights

His week marks the 46th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court reproductive-rights case Griswold v. Connecticut , in which the Court struck down Connecticut's ban on the distribution and use of contraceptives (at least for married couples). The decision was important not only in itself but because it laid the framework for other important decisions like Roe v. Wade , which came less than 10 years later.

It may seem remarkable that a strong 7-2 decision striking down a stupid and unpopular law that the Warren Court's house conservative John Marshall Harlan called the most clearly unconstitutional law he had seen in his career has become such a source of controversy. The attack on Griswold represents the ability of Republicans to selectively use catchphrases to deride concepts in decisions they don't like, even if the concepts themselves are unexceptionable.

Justice William O. Douglas' opinion for the Court argued that the Connecticut statute was unconstitutional because it violated the "right to privacy."

The phrase, which has been fodder for conservatives' critiques of the Roe decision since it was made in 1973, does not, of course, appear in the Constitution. But as Justice Douglas noted: "Specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance." If you think about what this means, it's perfectly sensible: Explicitly stated rights in the Constitution entail other rights. And yet conservative legal observers have made a cottage industry of invoking "penumbras and emanations" and "right to privacy" as if merely repeating the words were enough to refute Douglas' opinion. Throw in "judicial activism," and you have a list of the most common buzz phrases used to discredit opinions conservatives don't like.

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