WEST TOWNSHEND — Without a doubt, Connecticut has been the leader of reproductive rights legislation.
In 1879, Fairfield County Rep. Phineas Taylor (P.T.) Barnum sponsored a law prohibiting use of “any drug, medical article, or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception” by anyone in the state.
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.
For her, 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, M.D. 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 court case in state court.
* * *
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. She changed history.
The court's decision in Griswold v. the State of Connecticut not only legalized the dissemination of birth control of all forms 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 disclosure or scrutiny as well as from government intrusion into personal issues and decisions.
In 1973, eight years after Griswold v. the State of Connecticut and after two years of argument in the U.S. Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade established a woman's undeniable right to abortion without government intervention.
Now, almost 50 years later, on June 24, 2022, the current Supreme Court changed its collective mind, nullifying Roe v. Wade. In effect, the Supreme Court of the United States has turned the clock back 140 years.
* * *
Now, Griswold v. the State of Connecticut itself is in danger of reversal by the Supreme Court. Few people even know that Griswold v. the State of Connecticut established - for both women and men - the right to privacy. This alone should be precedent enough for a woman to retain the right to choose her own reproductive path.
Griswold v. the State of Connecticut codifies an individual's right to privacy. But today, unfortunately, that right to privacy for all has been swept away. A final legal blow may come with a court challenge.
How can the United States of America call itself a democratic republic when momentous decisions about one's own body are made by a group of nine unelected officials?
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 - taking risks so that women and their partners can decide their own reproductive course.
What we need now is a multitude of Estelle Griswolds to take back the human right to privacy.