[1] The case involved a Connecticut "Little Comstock Act" that prohibited any person from using "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception".

The court held that the statute was unconstitutional, and that its effect was "to deny disadvantaged citizens ... access to medical assistance and up-to-date information in respect to proper methods of birth control."

[2] Although the U.S. Bill of Rights does not explicitly mention "privacy", Justice William O. Douglas wrote for the majority, "Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives?

[2] In the late 19th and early 20th century, physicians in the United States largely avoided the publication of any material related to birth control, even when they often recommended or at least gave advice regarding it to their married patients.

[3] She influenced the Connecticut Birth Control League (CBCL) and helped to develop the eventual concept of the Planned Parenthood clinics.

It provided services to women who had no access to a gynecologist, including information about artificial contraception and other methods to plan the growth of their families.

[5] During the 1940s, two cases arose from the provision of contraception by the Waterbury clinic, leading to legal challenges to the constitutionality of the Comstock law, but these failed on technical grounds.

In Tileston v. Ullman (1943), a doctor and mother challenged the law on the grounds that a ban on contraception could, in certain sexual situations, threaten the lives and well-being of patients.

It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints.He argued, foremost, that the Supreme Court should have heard the case rather than dismissing it.

[7] Struggling through legal battles against birth control restrictions in Connecticut, Griswold and PPLC made an initial effort to financially support women who wanted contraceptives to bus to cities in New York and Rhode Island.

[7] Griswold[8] and Dr. Buxton (PPLC medical volunteer),[9] opened a birth control clinic in New Haven, Connecticut,[10] "thus directly challeng[ing] the state law".

[7] The clinic opened on November 1, 1961, and that same day received its first ten patients and dozens of appointment requests from married women who wanted birth control advice and prescriptions.

Less than two days after the fact, police officers arrived, to which Griswold explained in detail both the operations of the clinic and openly admitted to breaking state law.

[15] The Court viewed marital privacy right's implicit nature to be similar, and in a now well-known line Douglas used the metaphor of shined light and its shadows to describe it.

Both justices' dissents argued that because the U.S. Constitution does not expressly mention privacy in any of its provisions, the Court had no basis to strike down Connecticut's Comstock Law.

The reasoning and language of both Griswold and Eisenstadt were cited in the concurring opinion by Associate Justice Potter Stewart in support of Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).

In the third trimester of pregnancy, abortion is potentially illegal with exception for the mother's health, which the court defined broadly in Doe v. Bolton.

On June 24, 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson overturned Roe, reversing the application of the Due Process Clause in the case of abortion and returning its regulation to state control under the Tenth Amendment.

Justice Kennedy's majority opinion, based on the liberty interest protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, stated that the Texas anti-sodomy statute touched "upon the most private human conduct, sexual behavior, and in the most private of places, the home", and attempted to "control a personal relationship that ... is within the liberty of persons to choose without being punished".

In Justice Clarence Thomas' concurrence, he argued, "In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell, ... Because any substantive due process decision is 'demonstrably erroneous' ... we have a duty to 'correct the error' established in those precedents," referring to decisions on contraception, sodomy, and same-sex marriage as future cases for the Supreme Court to reverse.