The Right to Contraception: State and Federal Actions, Misinformation, and the Courts

Mabel Felix, Laurie Sobel, and Alina Salganicoff
Oct 26, 2023

Introduction
The Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling has heightened interest in affirming the right to contraception. While the Court’s majority opinion stated that the Dobbs decision does not “cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” Justice Thomas argued in his concurring opinion that in future cases, the Court should reconsider precedent that relied on the same principles as Roe – including Griswold v. Connecticut, the Court’s 1965 landmark decision that recognized the right of married people to obtain contraceptives – and overturn those decisions. The prospect of the Court overturning Griswold moved some in Congress to introduce federal legislation that would protect the right to contraception, though that legislation is unlikely to advance in the current divided Congress. Similarly, some state legislators have recently introduced measures to protect the right to obtain contraceptives.

Continued: https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/issue-brief/the-right-to-contraception-state-and-federal-actions-misinformation-and-the-courts/

USA – Abortion opponents are gunning for contraception, too

Efforts to roll back abortion and contraception access aim to control women’s sexuality

By Anya Jabour, Washington Post
March 25, 2022

Last weekend, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) released a video criticizing Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, and denouncing what Blackburn called the “constitutionally unsound” ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut. In that 1965 case, the Supreme Court struck down a state law restricting married couples’ access to birth control on the basis that such laws infringed upon Americans’ right to privacy. The right to privacy established in this case subsequently informed the 1972 decision in Eisenstadt v. Baird, which extended privacy rights and contraceptive access to single women, and the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which declared access to safe and legal abortions a fundamental right protected by the U.S. Constitution.

Now, these landmark cases face political opposition and legal challenges.

Continued: (unblocked link) https://wapo.st/3IHR7EA

USA – The Forgotten Father of the Abortion Rights Movement

The Forgotten Father of the Abortion Rights Movement
What Bill Baird's aggressive, often illegal form of activism can teach a new generation about combating anti-abortion forces.

By Myra MacPherson
October 7, 2019

I first met Bill Baird in Hempstead, Long Island, on a freezing December night in 1968. This was 18 months after he was arrested and jailed for handing a can of contraceptive foam to an unmarried coed at Boston University. And it was some four years before the Supreme Court would hand down its decision in Eisenstadt v. Baird, the case that grew out of Baird’s illegal action and established the right of unmarried people to possess contraceptive products. Eisenstadt, in turn, was a crucial privacy precedent that the Court cited in 1973’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision establishing a woman’s right to an abortion. But on that night in 1968, Baird was attending to more immediate matters: a clinic packed with desperate women.

Continued: https://newrepublic.com/article/155240/forgotten-father-abortion-rights-movement