JUNE 7, 2006 41 years ago today the Supreme Court ruled that married people had the right to use contraception. While this ruling may seem quaint by today’s standards, it laid the foundation for reproductive privacy. . .

June 7, 1965
7–2 Decision
Majority: Douglas, Goldberg, Brennan, White, Harlan, Clark, Warren
Dissent: Black and Stewart

Griswold v. Connecticut explicitly recognized the constitutional right of marital privacy, thereby laying the foundation for subsequent recognition of reproductive privacy. By a vote of 7-2, the Supreme Court invalidated a Connecticut statute that prohibited the use of contraceptives as it applied to married persons, noting that the law "operates directly on an intimate relation of husband and wife and their physician's role in one aspect of that relation."

In extending constitutional protection to marital privacy, the Court relied on other decisions recognizing rights not explicitly mentioned in the constitution. Justice William O. Douglas, writing for the majority, wrote that "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by the emanations from those guarantees that give them life and substance" and that these "(v)arious guarantees create zones of privacy." Finding that the ban on contraceptives by married persons "concerns a relationship lying within the zone of privacy created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees," the majority concluded that the intrusion permitted by the law was "repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship."

Justice Goldberg, in concurrence, relied extensively on the Ninth Amendment, which states that the specific rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are not exhaustive. He remarked: "To hold that a right so basic and fundamental and so deep-rooted in our society as the right of privacy in marriage may be infringed because that right is not guaranteed in so many words by the first eight amendments to the Constitution is to ignore the Ninth Amendment and to give it no effect whatsoever." Justice Goldberg further noted that the marital right includes decisions whether to "bear children and raise a family."

Writing in dissent, Justices Black and Stewart took a literalist approach, arguing that a right of privacy did not exist in the Constitution because it was not specifically written into the text. Each was harshly critical of the flexible approaches used to discover a constitutional right to personal privacy.

Although in Griswold the majority’s analysis focused on the privacy rights of married couples, six years later in Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 921 (1972), the Court relied on Griswold to strike down a ban on contraceptives applicable only to single people, stating, "[i]f the right to 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."