The law is a powerful teacher: for good or ill, it forms as well as follows social mores. Among the effects but also the causes of the Sexual Revolution was the landmark US Supreme Court case of Griswold vs Connecticut (1965), which concerned two doctors who were arrested after opening a birth control clinic.
Connecticut law had created a crime for “any person who uses any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception”. The US Supreme Court found that such a law – not used in practice to arrest couples – was unconstitutional. Yet there seemed to be nothing in the US Constitution that e.g. a ban on sale of contraceptives violated. The judges could find no such provision in the Constitution so were reduced to claiming that implicit in it was what Judge William Douglas called a “right to marital privacy.”
