Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972)

The Supreme Court case of Eisenstadt v. Baird began when  Baird gave away Emko vaginal foam to a woman following a Boston University lecture on birth control and overpopulation. Massachusetts charged Baird with a felony: distributing contraceptives to unmarried men or women. Under the law, only married couples could obtain birth control products, and only registered doctors or pharmacists could provide them. Baird was not an authorized distributor of contraceptives.
At the time, Massachusetts General Laws provided for a maximum five-year term of imprisonment for anyone who “gives away . . . any drug, medicine, instrument or article whatever for the prevention of conception,” except as prescribed by a registered physician for any married person. The State Supreme Judicial Court’s interpretation was that the violation of these provisions made it a felony for anyone, other than a registered physician or pharmacist acting in accordance with a physician’s order, to dispense any article with the intention that it be used for the prevention of conception.
According to the Supreme Court, the legislative purposes the statute was meant to serve were not altogether clear. In a previous decision, the State Supreme Judicial Court noted only the state’s interest in protecting the health of its citizens. In another decision the court found a second and more compelling ground for upholding the statute: to protect morals through “regulating the private sexual lives of single persons.” The Court of Appeals, however, did not consider the promotion of health or the protection of morals through the deterrence of fornication to be the legislative aim. Instead, the court concluded that the statutory goal was to limit contraception in and of itself. The court held that this purpose conflicted “with fundamental human rights” under Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), where the Court struck down Connecticut’s prohibition against the use of contraceptives as an unconstitutional infringement of the right to marital privacy.
In Eisenstadt, the question the Court dealt with was, did the Massachusetts law violate the right to privacy acknowledged in Griswold v. Connecticut and protected from state intrusion by the Fourteenth Amendment?
In a 6-to-1 decision, the Court struck down the Massachusetts law, although not strictly on privacy grounds. The Court held that the law’s distinction between single and married individuals failed to satisfy the “rational basis test” of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Married couples were entitled to contraception under the Court’s Griswold decision. Withholding that right from single persons without a rational basis proved the fatal flaw. Thus, the Court stepped away from the emphasis on marital privacy in Griswold to uphold a less restrictive right to privacy and to invalidate the Massachusetts statute. “If the right of privacy means anything,” wrote Justice  J. Brennan, Jr., for the majority, “it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision to whether to bear or beget a child.”