Historic Cultural Clashes and Access to Health Care: Griswold v. Connecticut.

Posted on | April 29, 2021 | Comments Off on Historic Cultural Clashes and Access to Health Care: Griswold v. Connecticut.

Mike Magee

On Wednesday, May 5, 2021, I hope you’ll join me from 1:30 – 3:00 PM for a virtual lecture that President Biden highlighted in his speech to Congress this week – “Health Care ‘Right’ and the U.S. Constitution”. Register HERE. (Here is a small segment.)

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It began on March 7, 1844, with the birth of one man, Anthony Comstock, in New Canaan, Connecticut. Raised in a strict Christian home, his religiosity intensified during a two-year stint in the Union Army during the Civil War.

A member of the 17th Connecticut Infantry, he took great offense to the profanity and debauchery he witnessed in and among his fellow soldiers. With the strong support of church-based groups of the day, and as the self-proclaimed “weeder in God’s garden”, he sought out a purpose and found a political vehicle in New York City’s Young Men’s Christian Association, which he parlayed into a post as the United States Postal Inspector.

His overarching goal was to advance Victorian morality by stamping out smut. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, was chartered at his insistence by the New York state legislature in 1873, and included the twin mottos of “Morals, not Art and Literature” and “Books are feeders for brothels.”

Using local postal agents, his searches and seizures, whose subsequent sales were shared 50/50 with his own organization, bankrolled the lobbying of Congress necessary to pass the “Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use”, otherwise known as the Comstock Laws.

Pornography, contraceptive equipment, reproductive health literature, and books deemed risque’ or suggestive all fell into his cross-hairs. By his own account, prior to his untimely death on September 21, 1915, he had prosecuted 3600 defendants, seized 160 tons of obscene literature, enjoyed the active support of industry, the AMA, and the Catholic Church among others, and sparked equally restrictive and intrusive legislation in 24 states – one of those being Connecticut.

Along the way, he made powerful enemies. For example, in 1905 George Bernard Shaw, on hearing in London that his new play, “Man and Superman” had been removed from the New York Public Library, had this to say in a public letter published in the New York Times: “Dear Sir – Nobody outside of America is likely to be in the least surprised. Comstockery is the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States. Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all.”

A decade later, arch-enemy Margaret Sanger, laid him bare with these words, “We know the capitalist class must have a slave class, bred in poverty and reared in ignorance. That is why it is quite consistent with their laws that there should be a heavy penalty of five years’ imprisonment for imparting information as to the means of preventing conception. Industry…(must) under sell its rival competitors. They have only one way to do this, and that is to get labor cheap. The cheapest labor is that of women and children; the larger the number of children in a family, the earlier they enter the factory.”

Two decades later, with World War II looming FDR and Justice Hughes weighed priorities and decided indecency was less of a threat to the country than venereal disease among the troops. The AMA lent its support as well.

But the final nail in the Comstock coffin was fittingly delivered nearly 50 years after his death in the crusader’s home state where Comstock Laws were still on the books. The protagonist was Estelle Griswold, Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League. In 1961, Griswold was arrested and fined $100 for providing contraceptives and birth control advice in their New Haven office. That arrest led to a landmark suit (Griswold v. Connecticut) in the Supreme Court with effects far beyond Comstock.

On June 7, 1965, in a 7 to 2 decision, Justice William O. Douglas wrote: “Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship. We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights — older than our political parties, older than our school system.”