How my great-aunt stopped P.T. Barnum and legalized birth control in the U.S.
Without a doubt, Connecticut is the leader of reproductive rights legislation, both anti and pro.
In 1879, Fairfield County Rep. Phineas Taylor Barnum sponsored a bill prohibiting the use of “any drug, medical article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception” by anyone in the state of Connecticut. If the name Barnum sounds familiar, it’s because P.T.’s name is immortalized in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus brand. He’s the 19th-century entrepreneur whose carnival sideshows extracted coins from pockets as folks witnessed the weird and abnormal.
During the next 80 years, the Barnum law, which also prohibited the dissemination of contraceptive information, was the impetus for numerous challenges, but to no avail, until Estelle Trebert Griswold took charge. She was my mother’s feisty aunt, married to Uncle Richard Griswold. In the 1950s, according to the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame, Aunt Stelle organized volunteers to shuttle women to birth control clinics in Rhode Island and New York.
The tipping point was the 1960 approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration of the birth control pill, available in every state — except Connecticut.
In 1961, Aunt Stelle was executive director of Planned Parenthood. She teamed up with gynecologist/Yale Medical School Professor C. Lee Buxton to open a birth control clinic in New Haven to purposefully break P.T. Barnum’s law. Their intention: to challenge and change the law in Connecticut.
They were arrested and lost their Connecticut court case.
In 1965, when I was a college student in Washington, D.C., Aunt Stelle was fighting her case nearby in the U.S. Supreme Court. It changed history. The court’s decision in Griswold v. the State of Connecticut not only legalized the dissemination of birth control in all 50 states, but also established a new constitutional right — the right to privacy.
The right to privacy includes the right to have one’s personal matters protected from public scrutiny as well as from government intrusion.
In 1973, eight years later, the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade established a woman’s undeniable right to abortion without government intervention. Sadly, this right has been eroded in the past 48 years, as we have witnessed recently in Texas.
Few people know that Griswold v. the State of Connecticut established — for women and men — the right to privacy. This alone should be enough for a woman’s right to choose her reproductive path.
Regrettably, I did not know Aunt Stelle well. The few times Uncle Richard visited when I was a kid in Massachusetts, Aunt Stelle was busy with work. Nonetheless, she is my hero. She took risks so that women and their partners could decide their own reproductive course.
Griswold v. the State of Connecticut codifies an individual's right to privacy. But today, unfortunately, that right, which includes reproductive freedom, is being attacked by state legislatures, judges and anti-choice special-interest groups.
What we need now are a multitude of Estelle Griswolds to protect and expand the hard-won women’s right to privacy at both the state and national levels.