Connecticut’s anti-contraception statute was part of a national movement to criminalize birth control. The driving force behind that movement was Connecticut native Anthony Comstock, “a prominent anti-vice crusader who believed that anything remotely touching upon sex was obscene.” Bolger v. Youngs Drug Prods. Corp., 463 U.S. 60, 69 n.19 (1983). After moving to New York following his service in the Civil War, Comstock founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. This vigilante vice squad initially performed arrests and seized obscene materials, but eventually began lobbying for anti-obscenity legislation. By 1873, Comstock had successfully lobbied Congress to pass an anti-obscenity bill to suppress the trade and circulation …show more content…
In Connecticut, circus impresario P.T. Barnum (by then a state senator from Bridgeport) took up the anti-obscenity torch. Barnum had become involved in politics during the lead up to the Civil War, loudly and repeatedly denouncing slavery. Following the Civil War, he took up the cause of the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice (a Comstock organization that boasted the presidents of Amherst, Brown, Dartmouth, and Yale among its members). The New England Society sponsored Connecticut anti-contraception bill, which initially focused on prohibiting the distribution of articles and literature about contraception and …show more content…
When the bill reached his Committee, Barnum prepared a substitute bill that included, for the first time, language that extended criminal penalities beyond mere trafficking in “obscene” literature. The bill also punished “use” of “any drug, medicine, article, or instrument” for the “purpose of preventing conception.” See Conn. Gen. Stat. § 53-32. The bill also sought to punish any person who “assists, abets, counsels, causes, hires or commands another to” use contraception. See Conn. Gen. Stat. § 54-196. This was by far the most restrictive law passed in any state, subjecting married couples (and their doctors) to arrest and imprisonment for using birth control.
2. Police Raids, Justice Harlan, and the Road to Griswold
The law was generally ignored until 1939, when a public outcry over illegal contraception clinics led to police raids and convictions. The Connecticut Birth Control League (led by Katharine Hepburn, the mother and namesake of the Academy Award winning actress) had spent years unsuccessfully lobbying to repeal the anti-contraception law. Faced with legislative disinterest, the League decided simply to open public birth control clinics in the mid-1930s. The public expressed indifference to the clinics, and the League opened offices in Hartford, Greenwich, New Haven and