Witness to History
When the U.S. Supreme Court decided Griswold v. Connecticut on June 7, 1965, Cornelia Jahncke was president of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut (PPLC). In that landmark case, the court struck down state laws prohibiting the use of contraceptives by married couples and paved the way for the nearly universal acceptance of contraceptives in the U.S. today.
Jahncke, now 90, tells the story in her own words:
“I was married and living in New York City in 1940, and my husband was overseas a lot of the time. I was able to volunteer at St. Ann’s hospital. I worked on the maternity wards and saw women lying there with their fifth and sixth children. They came from poor areas of the city. Excess childbearing had an effect on a lot of them, and they were unable to stop their childbearing. It was like that story Margaret Sanger told about Sadie Sachs, whose doctor said she should tell her husband Jake to sleep on the roof if she didn’t want more children.
“When I came to Greenwich in 1949 from New York City, my sister was already living here. She was among a number of Connecticut women — including a very prominent woman, Mrs. John Sterling Rockefeller — who went up to the state legislature to lobby to try to get them to legalize birth control, but they were not successful.
“I had been serving as president of PPLC since 1953. Estelle Griswold, executive director of PPLC, was instrumental in getting our case before the Supreme Court. She got together with Dr. Lee Buxton of Yale Medical School and opened a clinic on Orange Street in New Haven, where among other things they dispensed birth control. Birth control was illegal in Connecticut, in Massachusetts, as well as in other states. The clinic stayed open for 10 days and then was raided by the police, and Estelle and Lee spent the night in jail. The same thing happened to Margaret Sanger when she opened the first birth control clinic 90 years ago.
“They decided to file a lawsuit but first they had to go through the Connecticut courts. The attorney who took it through the courts was Catherine Roraback, and Thomas Emerson of Yale Law School argued the case before the Supreme Court.
“When we won, we weren’t astonished, we were delighted. We’d been working for that. It was what we wanted. It was a moment of great triumph and great satisfaction to have birth control made legal for married couples. We were always convinced that eventually we would get our way.
“But through the years we have always had people demonstrating against us. And George Bush is no help whatsoever. He’s a hindrance. Funds for foreign contraceptive aid have been restricted. He has no interest in the subject whatsoever. Hopefully in two years we can have a positive change when we get rid of George Bush. There is hope for the future. You always have to be hopeful.”
Published: 01.26.07 | Updated: 05.09.07
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