From Clinic to Court: Feminist Organizing and the Fight for Birth Control in Griswold v. Connecticut
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Abstract
In 1961, Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut (PPLC) Director Estelle Griswold and Yale School of Medicine Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology Chair Dr. Charles Lee Buxton were arrested. Charged with opening an illegal birth control clinic in New Haven, the two embarked on a four-year battle to overturn Connecticut’s decades-old anti-birth control law. The resulting Supreme Court case, Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), was the culmination of decades of advocacy, coalition building, and cultural conflict over reproductive rights in one of the nation’s most restrictive states.
Griswold v. Connecticut established the constitutional right to marital privacy, creating the protection needed for all married couples to use birth control. The arguments presented in the case reflected not only the moral fervor of the era but also social anxieties about sexuality, public health, and women’s autonomy. More than a legal milestone, it was a turning point in sex-related law, laying the groundwork for subsequent landmark decisions expanding access to contraception (Eisenstadt v. Baird, 1972), abortion (Roe v. Wade, 1973), and later, protections for same-sex intimacy (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003).
Most legal scholarship on Griswold v. Connecticut focuses on the case’s constitutional implications, using it as a lens to examine broader shifts in legal history. This focus often comes at the expense of a deeper historical analysis of the feminist movement’s role in overturning Connecticut’s law. Griswold did not emerge from the Supreme Court fully formed; rather, it was the product of years of activism, strategic defiance, and public pressure. In a state that is now considered overwhelmingly liberal, how did such a law persist for so long? How was it ultimately overturned? What did this case reveal about the feminist movement’s presence in Connecticut in the 1960s? These questions frame the central inquiry of this essay.
Recommended Citation
Lee, Lynn Q., "From Clinic to Court: Feminist Organizing and the Fight for Birth Control in Griswold v. Connecticut" (2025). Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections. 35.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/mssa_collections/35
This Article is Open Access