The Space Around a Marriage
Article by Ayman Fouad Abdelgawad
Griswold v. Connecticut
The case
Connecticut criminalised the use of contraceptives and assistance or counselling related to their use. Estelle Griswold, who directed a Planned Parenthood clinic, and a physician were convicted after providing married couples with advice and contraception.
What the Court decided
The Court invalidated the law as applied to married couples. Justice William Douglas's opinion reasoned that guarantees in the Bill of Rights create zones of privacy protecting the marital relationship from this intrusion.
The Justices agreed on the result through different constitutional routes, including the Ninth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment liberty. The decision concerned contraception within marriage; later cases extended aspects of privacy and reproductive autonomy, and later doctrine has changed. This essay addresses Griswold itself.
Why it is worth thinking about
A constitution need not list every protected human activity as though drafting an inventory. Some freedoms depend on a surrounding space in which expressly protected choices can be lived rather than merely named.
My reflection is that privacy is not simply secrecy. It is authority over parts of life whose intimacy would be damaged if government could enter them without an exceptionally strong reason. Marriage does not become valuable because it hides conduct, but because it creates a relationship with room for private judgment.
Griswold also exposes the difficulty of constitutional reasoning from implication. The danger of invention is real. So is the danger of reading liberty so narrowly that its written guarantees cannot protect the life they were meant to make possible.
Read the decision
Griswold v. Connecticut — archived U.S. Reports scan (PDF)
381 U.S. 479 (1965). Reading reference: pp. 480–486 in the printed report. Archive: Library of Congress, United States Reports collection.