
06/06/2025
Who is Estelle Naomi Trebert Griswold, born in Connecticut, June 8, 1900? Well, she was instrumental in setting the legal precedent that contraception for married couples constituted a right to privacy, which in turn helped to propel the women’s reproductive rights movement into the American zeitgeist, leading to such cases involving women’s bodies as the well-known Roe v. Wade case. Shall I go on?
Griswold was not necessarily what one might call a “girly girl” as a child. A bit of a free spirit, she was forced to graduate high school a year after her cohorts because she skipped school a little too often. However, she was able to enroll into the Hartt Music school and went on to become a successful singer, much to her parents’ chagrin, traveling in France and then later touring with a Chicago-based traveling show group. By 1929, she claimed a little fame as a popular New York radio singer.
Eventually, Griswold found herself back in Europe following WWII, not singing, but resettling refugees affected by the war and witnessing such desperate poverty and heartbreaking food insecurity that she set her sights on solving the problem of overpopulation, something she believed exacerbated the above stated conditions. Women needed to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies, she decided, and perhaps keep them from suffering abuse from husbands who were oblivious to their wives’ needs.
She and her husband did not have children.
In 1950, she returned home and settled in New Haven, CN, and by 1954, she was serving as executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut. She organized what was called “border runs” wherein women were shuttled to NY or RI to be advised concerning proper birth control methods. Her aim as director was to actually change the P.T. Barnum-sponsored 1879 edict banning the sale and/or manufacture of contraception products, which was still in force. She went right to work on her goal to address overpopulation.
In a court case labeled Poe v. Ullman, Poe being the alias of a couple whose loss of three babies due to genetic causes, led them to try to persuade the court to allow them to use birth control. As director of Planned Parenthood, Griswold got involved. Her lawyers presented the argument that the couple had the right to privacy concerning their marital relations. The couple needed contraception to save the wife from physical danger due to another pregnancy and from the potential deterioration of the mental health of both. However, the state denied to simply change the law for the sake of the privacy plea because the couple was not prosecuted for this offense. No harm, no foul.
Interestingly, when the case rose to SCOTUS, the justices, in a 5-4 decision, ruled with the lower court, claiming that since the law had never been enforced, the consequence of violating it wasn’t harmful, nobody was fined or jailed or anything, so the statute remained in place. It was Constitutional.
Griswold was outraged. What, go ahead and violate this so-called law? Then why have it on the books at all? Just don’t tell anybody? Are all laws instituted that way? Like the blue laws that are still on the books in some states but nobody pays attention to them.
Griswold decided to test the law’s enforceability.
In 1961, she opened a clinic with gynecologist Dr. C. Lee Buxton from the Yale School of Medicine, which she staffed with doctors willing to advise women of their reproductive options. Protestors showed up. Detectives descended on the building to see what was going on. They interviewed two patients at the clinic who had been counseled about birth control, and Griswold and Buxton were consequently charged with illegally proffering information about contraception and were fined $100 each. The clinic was shut down. This is exactly what Griswold wanted to happened. Four years later, their court case was considered by the US Supreme Court and was called Griswold v. Connecticut.
Griswold’s lawyers argued that the anti-contraception law violated the couple’s marital privacy, making it unconstitutional. Changing the argument and focusing on the right to privacy was a game changer this time. The Poe v. Ullman decision was ultimately considered null and void, and the court voted 7-2 declaring that, yes, the law was indeed unconstitutional—giving all married couples the right to use birth control.
In 1972, SCOTUS extended the right to privacy to individuals, unmarried women, and in 1973, in the case of Roe v. Wade, the court gave all women the right to opt for an abortion.
This decision, as we know, set off an almost 50-year-long counter-argument that reversed the court’s 1972 decision in 2022, and spawned additional much disputed issues regarding women’s rights to make decisions about their body and doctors’ legal efforts to provide reproductive healthcare to female patients--among others.
What would Estelle Trebert Griswold say today? Good question. As Walter Cronkite used to say, “And that’s the way it is.”
Cookie today: Snickerdoodle from TasteAtlas. Picture from Wikipedia