LIBERTY AND SEXUALITY
The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade
by David J. Garrow
Pulitzer-winner Garrow (Bearing the Cross, 1986, etc.) offers a vast and ponderous narrative history of the 50-year struggle to establish abortion rights. Garrow's long story begins in 1920's Connecticut with the establishment of the Connecticut Birth Control League and its battle for birth-control rights. Using an 1879 state law prohibiting the use of contraceptive devices, Connecticut authorities attempted to close down clinics operated by the League, ultimately persuading the Connecticut Supreme Court in 1940 to uphold the statute. Garrow then recounts both political and legal battles by birth-control proponents to change the law. In 1961, the US Supreme Court decided Poe v. Ullman, a collusive suit in which two married couples claimed they had sought contraceptive advice from a physician who had withheld his advice for fear of prosecution. By one vote, the Court decided that since there was no immediate threat of prosecution, it would decline to decide the case. Encouraged by the closeness of the vote, birth-control forces now tried a direct challenge to the Connecticut law. The result was Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), in which the Supreme Court finally struck down the Connecticut law as unconstitutional, basing its analysis on a previously unarticulated constitutional ``right to privacy.'' As Garrow shows, Griswold's privacy doctrine had far- reaching implications: it became the basis for challenging anti- abortion laws not just in Connecticut but throughout the country. Garrow tells of the long political battles to legalize abortion, of the first abortion cases in 1969, and, finally, of Roe v. Wade itself; here, basing its analysis on the privacy right it found in Griswold, the Court found a federal constitutional right to abortion. Finally, Garrow covers post-Roe privacy cases, as well as judicial and legislative attempts to chip away at the privacy doctrine. His account culminates in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), with the Supreme Court reaffirming Roe, seemingly for good. Exhaustive and exhausting.