Today is the fortieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Eisenstadt v. Baird, a decision that barred states from denying birth control to unmarried persons. Unlike its predecessor, Griswold v. Connecticut, Eisenstadt is a relatively uncelebrated decision, though with it, the Court validated what is now a thoroughly modern mindset about sex: that sex can be fun, and it isn’t necessarily all about baby-making. The decision extended the right to privacy to include single persons– using an equal protection argument that claimed that states cannot discriminate against unmarried people when it comes to laws restricting access to birth control. It was a victory for single men and women.
To understand why Eisenstadt was such an important decision requires a look at the history of birth control. Though humans have been having sex for fun for millenia, reliable contraception is a new phenomenon. The debut of the rubber condom in the mid-nineteenth century was a welcome departure from old methods of barrier contraception that employed linen or intestines (sounds lovely, no?). Charles Goodyear patented the vulcanization process in 1844, and sex-loving people the world over celebrated by almost immediately producing the first rubber condoms.
With the professionalization of medicine during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contraception became the realm of physicians and, eventually, the state. Laws that outlawed contraception, like those that outlawed abortion, were products of the late Victorian Era. States sought to control public health and morals by restricting access to contraception and abortion for women, and physicians ensured this by making women’s health their concern and shutting out midwives.
Not that these efforts stopped people from having sex and using contraception. Margaret Sanger led an international movement for birth control in the early twentieth century, seeking to overturn nineteenth century anti-contraception legislation and the Comstock Laws, which aimed to prevent even the dissemination of information about birth control.
By the mid-twentieth century, Americans were as randy as ever. In 1953, Alfred Kinsey announced his findings that half of all women had sex before marriage, and seven years later, the birth control pill became available to women by prescription. In 1965, the year that the Griswold decision was handed down, thirty states had laws banning anyone from legally obtaining contraception. Though Griswold made it clear that the state could not intrude on the marriage bed, single people were left out of this constitutional right to sexy, sexy privacy.
Though Kinsey’s findings indicate that perhaps the sexual revolution wasn’t much of a revolution at all, the 1960s and early 1970s were years when women’s control over their fertility finally gained traction in legislatures and courts. Eisenstadt was decided in 1972, just one year before Roe and Frontiero— two decisions that validated women’s equality and their ability to make decisions for themselves. Justice Brennan wrote in the majority decision, ” If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” For women, Eisenstadt was a major victory. It was also a precursor to the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision, which extended the right to privacy in the bedroom to homosexual individuals.
In order to properly celebrate Eisenstadt Day, I think you all know what to do.
