Decision: Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972)
Contraception and Privacy
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Should people be allowed access to drugs or devices designed to stop contraception, and thus be able to engage in sex without having to worry as much about pregnancy? There have been many laws in the United States which prohibited the manufacture, distribution, transportation, or advertisement of such drugs and devices. Those laws were challenged and the most successful line or argument stated that such laws interfered with a sphere of privacy which belonged to the individual.
Background Information
Massachusetts law made it a felony for anyone to give away a drug, medicine, instrument, or article for the prevention of conception except in the case of
- a registered physician administering or prescribing it for a married person or
- an active registered pharmacist furnishing it to a married person presenting a registered physician's prescription.
Appellee William Baird was convicted under this law first, for exhibiting contraceptive articles in the course of delivering a lecture on contraception to a group of students at Boston University and, second, for giving a young woman a package of Emko vaginal foam at the close of his address. Baird challenged the law as conflicting "with fundamental human rights" under Griswold v. Connecticut.
Court Decision
On March 22, 1972 the Court ruled 6-1 in favor of Baird, finding that the law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The State offered a number of arguments in their attempt to justify the law. The Court rejected the claim that the deterrence of fornication was reasonable purpose of the statute, since the statute was riddled with exceptions making contraceptives freely available for use in premarital sex. The Court also rejected the argument that the protection of public health through the regulation of the distribution of potentially harmful articles was reasonably the purpose of the law, since, if health were the rationale, the statute would be both discriminatory and overbroad.
In the decision, the Court found that not only did the principles applied in Griswold have relevance here, but that they were stronger here:
Enforcement of the Massachusetts statute will materially impair the ability of single persons to obtain contraceptives. In fact, the case for according standing to assert third-party rights is stronger in this regard here than in Griswold because unmarried persons denied access to contraceptives in Massachusetts, unlike the users of contraceptives in Connecticut, are not themselves subject to prosecution and, to that extent, are denied a forum in which to assert their own rights.
It might be objected that the finding in Griswold is related to the unique status of the marital relationship, but the Court addressed this and pointed out that the importance of the marital relationship lay not simply within the vows, but within the importance given it by the participants because they each have a realistic expectation of privacy, away from the intrusion of the government:
If under Griswold the distribution of contraceptives to married persons cannot be prohibited, a ban on distribution to unmarried persons would be equally impermissible. It is true that in Griswold the right of privacy in question inhered in the marital relationship. Yet the marital couple is not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own, but an association of two individuals each with a separate intellectual and emotional makeup. 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 this reason, the distinction made in the law between married and unmarried couples was found to violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Significance
Once more the Supreme Court upheld the idea that the government is obligated to respect a sphere of privacy for each individual, but this time the Court specifically focused on the individual as an individual, rather than as a member of a family unit. The conception of privacy at issue here is one which allows each person to make decisions about their lives which the government should not interfere with.
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