Roots of Roe

<v Narrator>The following is part of the Connecticut Experience series created by the Connecticut <v Narrator>Humanities Council and S.P. <v Narrator>TV. Together, we're exploring Connecticut's rich history and culture. <v Protesters>Where in the fuck did you get that? <v Protesters>We are no longer talking about a political issue. <v Protesters>This is not a political issue. <v Protesters>This is not an issue of rights. <v Protesters>This is not a social issue. <v Protesters>This is a dead baby. <v Protesters>This is a dead human baby. <v Protesters>Not the church, not the state, women must decide our fate <v Protesters>[chanting] <v Protesters>What about the baby's right? What about the babies, right?

<v Protesters>You're all gonna go to hell. <v Protesters>Go home. <v Protesters>[Screaming] <v Protesters>[singing] <v Guest>long emotional involvement with abortion as a personal, moral, legal <v Guest>and political issue is moving to new levels tonight. <v Guest>The Supreme Court's abortion decision, Roe versus Wade. <v Guest>Today's ruling, legalizing abortion. <v Guest>The Supreme Court. <v Speaker B>Abortion and contraception go back thousands and thousands of years.

<v Speaker B>So does the question of who shall control? <v Speaker A>Our attitudes about controlling human reproduction through abortion and contraception <v Speaker A>have changed radically over the centuries. <v Speaker A>So have our perceptions of the moral and ethical issues involved and how <v Speaker A>they should be resolved. <v Speaker B>For centuries, Connecticut has been at the forefront of change in the laws <v Speaker B>and customs that affect contraception and abortion. <v Anita Allen>Connecticut is a microcosm of the history of reproductive policies and attitudes. <v Anita Allen>Connecticut is a state which has undergone tremendous change in its abortion and <v Anita Allen>contraception laws. <v Speaker A>The first documented surgical abortion case in North America took <v Speaker A>place in Connecticut just 250 years ago. <v Speaker A>It's part soap opera, part ghost story. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>In the spring of 1742 in the rolling hills of northeastern Connecticut, <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>Sarah Grosvenor, a 19 year old, found out that she was pregnant.

<v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>Her lover, a [unclear], was the son of a local tavern keeper and <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>militia lieutenant. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>One third of all couples in New England at this time conceived children <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>before a child before marriage. So it wasn't unusual that Sarah had become pregnant by <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>her lover. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>For reasons that we don't know. He did not want to marry Sarah, and he went to <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>a physician in a neighboring town, a physician who had a rather shady criminal past <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>and purchase from him a powder and abortifacient. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>By early August. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>Sarah had not miscarried, and Hallowell decided that he must operate. <v Speaker A>And then the doctor opening his satchel took an instrument out. <v Speaker A>Then he tried to remove the child for some time in vain, putting her to the utmost <v Speaker A>distress. <v Speaker A>At last, she observed, he trembled and immediately perceived a strange alteration in

<v Speaker A>her body and which she desired him to call in somebody for, she feared she was dying <v Speaker A>and instantly swooned away. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>She did not at that in that episode abort. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>But two days later, when she was at home, she miscarried. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>Her sister and her young cousin buried the fetus in the woods. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>And perhaps at that moment they thought they had successfully covered up the fact that <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>Sarah had been pregnant. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>But very soon, she became very sick. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>She had a fever, delirium, convulsions in mid-September. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>Sarah died. <v Speaker A>The story was hushed up for three years, perhaps to save the family's <v Speaker A>reputations. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>Oral tradition in Pomfret has it that the story came out because <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>Sarah's sister was very troubled by her conscience and that Sarah's ghost <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>visited her sister's bedroom at night and urged her plead

<v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>with her to tell the story. <v Speaker A>The Connecticut authorities came to Pomfret and charged Hollowell, the doctor, <v Speaker A>with abortion. He was later found guilty of the misdemeanor of <v Speaker A>abortion. <v Anita Allen>Colonial New England was governed by the common law tradition, which our nation inherited <v Anita Allen>from England under that tradition. <v Anita Allen>Abortion was a crime, but it was only a misdemeanor, not a felony. <v Anita Allen>And only late abortions were criminalized. <v Anita Allen>Those which occurred after the point at which woman was so-called quick with child. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>Quickening was understood as the time when the woman felt the fetus move <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>within her. And that could be anywhere at about four or five months. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>To try to abort before quickening was not a crime. <v Speaker A>The quickening doctrine was rooted in midevil, theology. <v Stephen Carter>The midevil understanding the understanding biblical times of how pregnancy occurred <v Stephen Carter>was that the sperm included a homunculus, which was

<v Stephen Carter>a fully formed human being. <v Stephen Carter>Just a very, very small homunculus is fully formed in the male sperm. <v Stephen Carter>And if the woman was fertile the houmunculus would grow. <v Stephen Carter>Basically, the mediæval concern was about saving souls and the idea <v Stephen Carter>was that an aborted fetus, if it had a soul, <v Stephen Carter>would go to hell because the soul had not been baptized. <v Stephen Carter>No one talked in those days about, for example, as you see now, the health of the <v Stephen Carter>pregnant woman and people didn't really talk about much about fetal life. <v Stephen Carter>People really talked much more about the protection of the soul. <v Stephen Carter>So even the early English common law was deeply bound up in religious understandings <v Stephen Carter>of the purpose of life. <v Stephen Carter>The purpose of life being salvation. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>[banging] In English common law, though, abortion after quickening was a <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>criminal act, but it wasn't equated with murder.

<v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>What they were most concerned about was not that a fetus had been destroyed, but that <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>Sarah Grosvenor had lost her life. <v Speaker A>For the young people of Pumphrey, Sarah's abortion raised a moral issue. <v Speaker A>But the issue was not the abortion itself. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>When you examine their own language describing these events, we see that what they're <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>most concerned about, what they're most guilty about, is their sense of <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>that abortion was used to cover a prior sin. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>In this case, the sin was what they called fornication, sex before marriage. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>We find absent in the 18th century of discussion of abortion as being <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>bad in and of itself. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>The concern is not so much about abortion per say, but that it's used as a cover <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>up. And that's a very different sort of discourse than the one one finds in the late <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>19th century when people are trying to make all abortion illegal. <v Speaker B>In 1821, Connecticut passed the first law in the country <v Speaker B>regulating abortion.

<v David Musto>It expanded Connecticut's law against poisoning by making it against the law to use <v David Musto>poison to induce an abortion. <v David Musto>And a woman quick with child. <v David Musto>Like earlier common law, the Connecticut statute did not make it illegal to cause an <v David Musto>abortion in a woman prior to quickening. <v Susan Reverby>They were about making sure that women were not poisoned by quacks and <v Susan Reverby>making sure that doctors and herbalists and pharmacists who provided abortifacients <v Susan Reverby>could be held legally liable if they provided women with poisons. <v Susan Reverby>So the concern had nothing to do with the fetus except after quickening, but <v Susan Reverby>really was about a woman's life and about medicine. <v Speaker B>But attitudes were about to shift radically under the impact of deep social changes. <v David Musto>The birthrate, in fact, fell dramatically throughout the 19th century. <v David Musto>In eighteen hundred, the average American woman bore seven children. <v David Musto>A century later, that number was half as much.

<v Susan Reverby>They either used abstinence, they tried a variety of different <v Susan Reverby>kinds of birth control devices or were drugs, <v Susan Reverby>many of which didn't work. <v Susan Reverby>And above all, they aborted. <v Linda Gordon>In colonial America and probably throughout all the way up <v Linda Gordon>through the 19th century, through the last century, the major form of birth control <v Linda Gordon>was abortion. <v David Musto>None of this was really talked about in public. <v David Musto>It was coded mail order houses would sell potions, various douches <v David Musto>and other items purportedly for feminine hygiene. <v David Musto>In reality, these coded words referred to abortifacients. <v David Musto>That is chemicals that were used to cause an abortion in a woman <v David Musto>as contraception and abortion became more widespread.

<v Speaker B>They increasingly became a political issue <v Speaker B>starting in the eighteen forties and peaking in the eighteen eighties. <v David Musto>There was a national campaign against birth control in general and abortion in <v David Musto>particular. In part, this opposition to birth control and abortion <v David Musto>represented the concern of opponents to the rising movement <v David Musto>for increasing women's rights. <v Linda Gordon>And they became concerned that what was going on was that <v Linda Gordon>women were trying to and I'm using the kind of language they would use were trying to <v Linda Gordon>evade their domestic responsibility. <v Linda Gordon>We're trying to go against the divinely ordained system <v Linda Gordon>in which women were supposed to be primarily wives and mothers, and <v Linda Gordon>people were alarmed by the decline in the birth rate. <v Linda Gordon>But the way they interpreted it was as if this decline in the birth rate <v Linda Gordon>was a plot of the women's rights movement.

<v Linda Gordon>19TH century feminists, ironically, were also opposed to <v Linda Gordon>both abortion and contraception. <v Linda Gordon>They had an entirely different proposal for fertility control, one which <v Linda Gordon>I know from past experience. And talking about this will be quite shocking to <v Linda Gordon>contemporary listeners. <v Linda Gordon>Their proposal for birth control was abstinence, except when a conception <v Linda Gordon>was desired. <v Linda Gordon>They were very concerned to establish the premise that. <v Linda Gordon>That even in marriage, sex should be voluntary, which was really a new <v Linda Gordon>and a radical idea. <v Speaker B>The initiative for outlawing abortions in the mid 19th century came not from <v Speaker B>religious leaders, but from the medical profession. <v David Bollier>The medical profession got involved in the mid eighteen hundreds. <v David Bollier>As it was starting to organize itself as a profession.

<v David Bollier>And it was frankly rather threatened by the fact that midwives <v David Bollier>were performing a good deal of abortions and doctors wanted to have control over this <v David Bollier>medical procedure. <v Speaker B>New medical knowledge had led doctors to doubt that quickening represented <v Speaker B>a significant point in the development of the fetus. <v Speaker B>Many, therefore, concluded that abortion, before quickening should be regarded <v Speaker B>as seriously as abortion after quickening. <v David Musto>In 1957, the racial Robinson's store started what was <v David Musto>to become a nationwide doctor led campaign against abortion. <v David Musto>He urged the fledgling American Medical Association to, in his words, enter an <v David Musto>earnest and solemn protest against the unwarrantable destruction of human <v David Musto>life. In 1859, at the annual meeting of the AMAA stores, <v David Musto>resolution was adopted unanimously. <v David Musto>It urged state medical societies to pressure the legislatures to enact strict anti <v David Musto>abortion laws.

<v David Musto>The very next year, Connecticut became the first state in the nation to enact such a law. <v David Musto>Among other provisions, it made it illegal for a woman to arrange <v David Musto>an abortion, to allow one to be performed on her or to attempt one herself. <v David Musto>The Connecticut law became the model for laws across the United States <v David Musto>by the eighteen eighties. Almost every state in the Union had a strict anti-abortion law. <v David Musto>In Connecticut, abortion would remain illegal for more than 100 <v David Musto>years. <v Speaker B>The 19th century campaign to regulate sexual practices reached its <v Speaker B>peak in the person of Anthony Comstock, who had grown up in a deeply <v Speaker B>religious partizan family in New Kanon, Connecticut. <v Martin Blatt>Anthony Comstock was part and parcel of a larger

<v Martin Blatt>movement of social purity. <v Martin Blatt>Which was very concerned and fearful of what was going <v Martin Blatt>on in urban America in the 19th century and what was happening <v Martin Blatt>was there was an influx of immigrants and these immigrants were out <v Martin Blatt>of control as far as, oh, they're Protestant. <v Martin Blatt>[screaming]. <v Martin Blatt>He was concerned that the United States was going to hell, <v Martin Blatt>literally and figuratively. <v Martin Blatt>That the representatives of the devil were <v Martin Blatt>in the form of gambling in the form of prostitution, <v Martin Blatt>alcohol, discussions and physiology, including sexuality, <v Martin Blatt>birth control, that all of these things, he link them all together and they're all <v Martin Blatt>spinning out of control. And it was his calling, his divine call. <v Martin Blatt>God had called him for a special purpose, and that was <v Martin Blatt>to suppress these conditions.

<v Martin Blatt>And he went about it with great vigor and energy and success <v Martin Blatt>from his point of view. <v Father Joseph Looney>Anthony comes that seems to me to be a man who was touched by the Holy Spirit. <v Father Joseph Looney>He experienced the higher <v Father Joseph Looney>fire and his life was purified. <v Father Joseph Looney>And he wanted to evangelize the culture, <v Father Joseph Looney>which is very important. <v Martin Blatt>Anthony Comstock viewed birth control <v Martin Blatt>as. Immoral. <v Martin Blatt>Disgusting. And murderous in <v Martin Blatt>the sense that the only time you should spill <v Martin Blatt>or waste your seed or come, that a mad man should come <v Martin Blatt>to put it in the vernacular, is when he <v Martin Blatt>is seeking to reproduce.

<v Martin Blatt>Otherwise, it's wrong. It's immoral, it's horrible. <v Martin Blatt>And your who knows what life you're cutting short <v Martin Blatt>in the process. <v Speaker B>In 1873, Comstock and his societys for the suppression <v Speaker B>of Vice successfully lobbied through Congress an anti obscenity <v Speaker B>law generally known as the Comstock Law. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>The Comstock law was a law regulating the U.S. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>Postal Service, and it declared that obscene materials <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>could not be sent through the mails. <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>What's important here is that any materials that had anything to do with birth control <v Cornelia Hughes Dayton>were specifically designated as obscene in that law. <v Speaker B>Comstock was appointed a special agent at the post office with the power to read, <v Speaker B>seize and destroy anything he deemed in violation of <v Speaker B>the act. One of Comstock's critics, feminist writer Angela <v Speaker B>Haywood.

<v Angela Haywood>Shall we submit to the loathsome impertinence which makes Anthony Comstock <v Angela Haywood>inspector and supervisor of American women's wombs? <v Narrator>But Comstock answered his critics with vigor. <v Anthony Comstock>The attempt to suppress obscene literature and advertisements is likely to <v Anthony Comstock>be successful. Now that it is backed by a congressional law. <v Anthony Comstock>Already, the Herald has been obliged to weed out its infamous <v Anthony Comstock>advertisements, advertisements have brought ruin to the souls and <v Anthony Comstock>bodies of countless human beings. <v Narrator>Following his national successes, Comstock organized state and regional societies <v Narrator>to promote his vision of social purity. <v Narrator>His New England Society for the Suppression of Vice described the impurity <v Narrator>it was fighting. <v Anthony Comstock>There is a hydra headed evil, malignant unrest <v Anthony Comstock>and for the most part, invisible, making the youth of the land <v Anthony Comstock>its victim, dragging by the thousands to mental,

<v Anthony Comstock>moral and even physical disease. <v Anthony Comstock>And then. <v Narrator>Connecticut was one of the many states to respond to the purity campaign by passing its <v Narrator>own little Comstock act, the most restrictive in the nation. <v Narrator>It banned the actual use of birth control as well as its sale or distribution. <v David Bollier>Curiously enough, the fight for the Comstock Law in 1879 was spearheaded <v David Bollier>by P.T. Barnum, the great circus impresario who happened to be a very influential <v David Bollier>state legislator and as someone who had brought wholesome middle class entertainment <v David Bollier>to the middle class. At the time, he thought the same sort of values ought to prevail in <v David Bollier>terms of birth control. And that's one reason he fought for this law, which <v David Bollier>ended up banning the use of contraceptives in Connecticut from 1879 <v David Bollier>to 1965. <v Susan Reverby>Despite the Comstock laws, more and more Americans, especially the more affluent,

<v Susan Reverby>were using contraceptives. <v Susan Reverby>The chance for poor women also to have access to birth control became <v Susan Reverby>the crusade of New York nurse Margaret Sanger. <v Margret Sanger>My preparation as a nurse awoke me to the sorrows of women. <v Margret Sanger>Tales were poured into my ears. <v Margret Sanger>A baby born dead. <v Margret Sanger>Great relief. <v Margret Sanger>The death of an older child. Sorrow, but again, relief of a sort. <v Margret Sanger>The story told a thousand times that death from abortion and children <v Margret Sanger>going into institutions. <v Margret Sanger>I shuddered with horror as I listened to the details and studied the reasons behind <v Margret Sanger>them destitution linked with excessive childbearing.

<v Margret Sanger>The waste of life seemed utterly senseless. <v Susan Reverby>Sanger began publishing a monthly newspaper advocating birth control <v Susan Reverby>as a means for the emancipation of women. <v Susan Reverby>Letters from women across the country poured in. <v Speaker>Dear Mrs. Sanger, I am only 34 years old and have given <v Speaker>birth to 12 children. <v Speaker>Only three of them living. <v Speaker>My husband is a good, hardworking man, but we are poor <v Speaker>people, Mrs. Sanger and the coffins of the last two are not paid for yet. <v Speaker>Dear Mrs. Sanger, I hate to bother you, but I am desperate. <v Speaker>I am the mother of 17 children. <v Speaker>I can still face more pregnancies, for I'm only 35 years old. <v Speaker>And truly, if that happens again, I know I shall be desperate enough <v Speaker>to either try abortion or commit suicide.

<v Susan Reverby>Sanger soon open birth control clinics and organize the American Birth Control <v Susan Reverby>League, which later became Planned Parenthood. <v Margret Sanger>I believe it was my duty to place motherhood on a higher level than <v Margret Sanger>enslavement and accident. <v Margret Sanger>For those beliefs, I was denounced, arrested. <v Margret Sanger>I was in and out of police courts and higher courts, indictments <v Margret Sanger>hung over my life. <v Susan Reverby>Margaret Sanger was then and she remains today a controversial figure. <v Margret Sanger>To look the whole world in the face with a go to hell look in the eyes <v Margret Sanger>to have an ideal to speak and act in defiance <v Margret Sanger>of convention. <v Dr, Hilda Standish>She was in prison three or four times. <v Dr, Hilda Standish>She stuck to what she felt was right and it brought hard <v Dr, Hilda Standish>days for her. She started a clinic in New York <v Dr, Hilda Standish>back in the teens.

<v Dr, Hilda Standish>She and her sister and a colleague, and they were all arrested <v Dr, Hilda Standish>after that and imprisoned. <v Father Joseph Looney>As you read over the life of Margaret Sanger, you can see that she was very promiscuous. <v Father Joseph Looney>She did not keep her marriage vows. <v Father Joseph Looney>Her rage was directed against motherhood in the Catholic Church. <v Father Joseph Looney>Margaret Sanger has influenced our society, perhaps more than any <v Father Joseph Looney>other single person. <v Susan Reverby>Connecticut's little Comstock statute was a natural target for the growing <v Susan Reverby>birth control movement. <v David J. Garpow>Katherine Beach Day, Katherine Holton Hepburn, the mother of the <v David J. Garpow>actress Annie Poret. <v David J. Garpow>Those three women in particular are really the founders of the <v David J. Garpow>birth control repeal movement in Connecticut. <v Dr, Hilda Standish>Margaret Sanger got in touch with Mrs. Hepburn They got together

<v Dr, Hilda Standish>and apparently Mrs.Hepburn took fire at this <v Dr, Hilda Standish>point and decided that we had to have it. <v Margret Sanger>A woman ought to have some say in the number of children she has. <v Margret Sanger>I believe in the freedom for men and women to determine the size <v Margret Sanger>of their family. Why should they have 15 children if they can only afford <v Margret Sanger>to take care of two? <v Dr, Hilda Standish>They had a meeting in the old Parsons Theater downtown Hartford <v Dr, Hilda Standish>to tell people about the movement. <v Dr, Hilda Standish>They thought they might have a small number. <v Dr, Hilda Standish>They had so many, they had to open all the balconies. <v Margret Sanger>We believe that the question as to whether or not and when <v Margret Sanger>a woman should have a child is not a question for the doctors to decide <v Margret Sanger>or for the state legislators to decide, but a question for the woman <v Margret Sanger>herself to decide. <v David J. Garpow>The real goal of Mrs. Sanger and Mrs. Hepburn and the other Connecticut women <v David J. Garpow>was to be able to open public clinic so

<v David J. Garpow>that low income or poverty population women, often <v David J. Garpow>from immigrant families, would be able to get birth control <v David J. Garpow>advice and assistance at very low with any <v David J. Garpow>financial cost. <v Margret Sanger>Doctors give it to those who couldn't pay. <v Margret Sanger>It leaves out those who have to go to public clinics. <v Margret Sanger>But these [unclear] by the enemies birth control. <v Margret Sanger>The present state law is really a law against the poor. <v David J. Garpow>The principal opposition from the 1923 hearing forward <v David J. Garpow>was from the Roman Catholic Church. <v Speaker A>Catholic opposition was based on church doctrine, as defined

<v Speaker A>in an encyclical by then Pope Pius the 11th. <v Pope Pius the 11th>Any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in a way that the act <v Pope Pius the 11th>is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense <v Pope Pius the 11th>against the law of God and nature. <v Pope Pius the 11th>And those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin. <v Father Thomas Lynch>I think it's fair to sum up the Catholic Church's teaching <v Father Thomas Lynch>at the present moment through its official documents and through the pronouncements of <v Father Thomas Lynch>the popes as saying that the unitive and the procreative aspect of <v Father Thomas Lynch>human intercourse must be honored whenever that action takes place. <v Father Thomas Lynch>And consequently, that there is something wrong whenever you try <v Father Thomas Lynch>to interfere with that in an artificial way. <v Speaker A>After repeated failures in the legislature, the Connecticut Birth Control League <v Speaker A>decided in 1935 to go ahead and open a birth control <v Speaker A>clinic in Hartford with Dr. Hilda Standish in charge.

<v Dr, Hilda Standish>Mrs. Hepburn was well-known in the community and she managed to get together <v Dr, Hilda Standish>a remarkably fine group of people to serve as sponsors <v Dr, Hilda Standish>for the clinic and be on the board of directors, lawyers, doctors, <v Dr, Hilda Standish>ministers and so forth. <v Speaker A>Meeting little resistance in Hartford, the Connecticut Birth Control League <v Speaker A>opened several other clinics around the state. <v David J. Garpow>And then in the fall of 1938, they again very <v David J. Garpow>quietly opened a clinic in what is <v David J. Garpow>at that time the most Catholic city in Connecticut, Waterbury. <v Speaker>[singing] <v Father Joseph Looney>The priest under the leadership of Father Eugene Crane got

<v Father Joseph Looney>together and they issued a decree to be read in all the Catholic churches. <v Catholic Clergy>It is the teaching of the Catholic Church that birth control is contrary <v Catholic Clergy>to the natural law and is therefore immoral. <v Catholic Clergy>We hereby publicly call the attention of the public prosecutors and demand <v Catholic Clergy>that they investigate and if necessary, prosecute <v Catholic Clergy>to the full extent of the law. <v Father Joseph Looney>And the next Monday, there was a very pleased close the clinic <v Father Joseph Looney>and sort of ran everything his friends out of town, two of <v Father Joseph Looney>state attorney Fitzgerald's detectives turned up at the clinic <v Father Joseph Looney>facilities on Field Street in downtown Waterbury and seized <v Father Joseph Looney>all of the diaphragms and other supplies that belonged to the <v Father Joseph Looney>Waterbury Birth Control Clinic. <v Speaker A>Members of the clinic staff were arrested and the Connecticut Supreme Court

<v Speaker A>upheld the constitutionality of the law. <v Speaker A>The Connecticut Birth Control League decided it had no choice <v Speaker A>but to close all the clinics across the state. <v Speaker B>During the 1940s and 50s, Connecticut, like the U.S. <v Speaker B>at large, was deadlock between two cultures with very different attitudes <v Speaker B>toward sexuality and contraception. <v Father Joseph Looney>When I was growing up. <v Father Joseph Looney>Contraception was absolutely taboo.

<v Father Joseph Looney>I remember when my brothers and sisters were born. <v Father Joseph Looney>We used to get ads from Planned Parenthood at the door. <v Father Joseph Looney>When my mother was coming home from the hospital with a baby and oh, we were furious <v Father Joseph Looney>about that. <v Father Joseph Looney>We were Catholic, and this was something that Catholic people <v Father Joseph Looney>certainly were spiritually allergic to. <v Father Joseph Looney>It was regarded as somewhat akin to prostitution. <v Father Joseph Looney>That sex was to affirm the marriage covenant. <v Father Joseph Looney>And they knew that once contraception was socially acceptable, <v Father Joseph Looney>that it would facilitate fornication and adultery. <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>Before birth control was legal in Connecticut. <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>Women had to drive out of state in order to get any reliable help with family planning.

<v Rev, Joan Forsberg>In the 1950s, I was part of a ministry team in a parish <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>and urban parish in New Haven. <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>I was also newly married and planning our family <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>and I would drive Parish Van out of state in <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>order to get help. Bit by bit, my neighbors asked to come with me. <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>So eventually I was driving carloads over the line into Port Chester, New York, <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>where it was legal to have birth control prescribed. <v Speaker B>Forsburgh and others began transporting more than 2000 patients a year from Connecticut <v Speaker B>to neighboring states, for birth control services. <v Speaker B>In 1961, Connecticut, Planned Parenthood decided once more <v Speaker B>to defy the state's anti birth control law. <v Speaker B>Twenty three years after the last Connecticut birth control clinics were closed, <v Speaker B>they opened a new clinic in New Haven. <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>I was by this time very tired of driving to New York, so I called the clinic

<v Rev, Joan Forsberg>to see the doctor there. <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>There was a citizen, a gentleman from West Haven, who was very upset at the opening <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>clinic, who had been picketing the clinic every day since it <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>opened and kept calling the New Haven police and the mayor saying, why aren't you <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>closing this down and closing this clinic down? <v Guest>I think that a Planned Parenthood center is is like a house of prostitution. <v Guest>It's against the natural law, which says marital relations are for procreation and not <v Guest>entertainment. I think the state law is a good law and it should be enforced. <v Judge Joe Clark>But it was opened up. <v Judge Joe Clark>They called a press conference and the headlines and the Haven Register were a <v Judge Joe Clark>birth control clinic, opens law to be tested. <v Judge Joe Clark>Principles demand to be arrested. <v Judge Joe Clark>So they work from our point of view. <v Judge Joe Clark>It was, you might say, an easy case to the Constitution. <v Judge Joe Clark>Ality of the statute had been upheld in Connecticut on five occasions.

<v Judge Joe Clark>There are three federal statutes which prevented the mailing, importing <v Judge Joe Clark>or shipping contraceptives, interstate commerce coming into the country. <v Judge Joe Clark>There were laws in 30 states on the subject. <v Judge Joe Clark>It was a it was the law. <v Speaker B>But the Supreme Court of the United States decided 72 to overturn <v Speaker B>the Connecticut statute. Justice William O. <v Speaker B>Douglas wrote the majority opinion. <v Justice Douglas>We deal with a right of privacy. <v Justice Douglas>Older than the Bill of Rights. <v Justice Douglas>Older than our political parties. <v Justice Douglas>Older than our school system. <v Justice Douglas>Marriage is a coming together. <v Justice Douglas>For better or worse, hopefully enduring and <v Justice Douglas>intimate to the degree of being sacred. <v Speaker B>Just half a century after Margaret Sanger's 1915 prosecution, <v Speaker B>the last legal prohibition of contraception in the United States was removed.

<v Robert Bork>Griswold involved the Connecticut statute, which banned the use of contraceptives <v Robert Bork>as a wholly bizarre and imaginary <v Robert Bork>case. <v Speaker B>The Griswold decision has been criticized by former judge and Supreme Court <v Speaker B>nominee Robert Bork, who was a professor at Yale Law School at the time. <v Robert Bork>None of us knew the law existed until the lawsuit was brought in as a test case about a <v Robert Bork>law that was never enforced, so that it was simply <v Robert Bork>a desire to have the court make a cultural statement, which it did. <v Catherine Roraback>Justice Bork didn't know what Connecticut was about when he was criticizing <v Catherine Roraback>the cases. And You know he, he may have been living there, but he obviously lived in <v Catherine Roraback>a world where his wife could go off to a doctor and get contraceptive care. <v Catherine Roraback>He didn't know what the real world was about. <v Robert Bork>Justice Douglas, who wrote the majority opinion, said that

<v Robert Bork>if you look at the Constitution, it protects various aspects of privacy. <v Robert Bork>The Fourth Amendment about unreasonable searches and seizures in your home by the police <v Robert Bork>protection aspect of privacy. <v Robert Bork>The First Amendment, when it protects religious freedom, protects an aspect of privacy. <v Robert Bork>Therefore, he said, gee, there must be a general right of privacy, which is not mentioned <v Robert Bork>in any of the explicit provisions of the Constitution. <v Robert Bork>We find there's a general right of privacy. We find this statute violates that right of <v Robert Bork>privacy and struck it down. <v Stephen Carter>The trouble with Griswold for a lot of its critics is that the court was unable to point <v Stephen Carter>to very much either in the precedents that had the previously decided Supreme Court cases <v Stephen Carter>or the Constitution itself or in the history <v Stephen Carter>of the Fourteenth Amendment to explain why this <v Stephen Carter>right existed. And to critics like Judge Bork and others, this <v Stephen Carter>is a fatal flaw. <v Robert Bork>Well, the fact is there is nothing in the Constitution that remotely bears

<v Robert Bork>on sexuality, remotely barriers on contraception either way <v Robert Bork>remotely bears upon sexual morals. <v Robert Bork>Either way, that remotely bears upon abortion. <v Robert Bork>Either way, those are subjects. <v Robert Bork>The Constitution is silent about it and leaves to the moral choice of the American <v Robert Bork>people through legislation. <v Catherine Roraback>The word privacy, in quotes, is not not to be found in the US Constitution, <v Catherine Roraback>as some critics of the decision have noted. <v Catherine Roraback>It's sort of part of the fabric of the Constitution. <v Catherine Roraback>It wouldn't be something you'd put into a constitution because you assumed that that <v Catherine Roraback>was no business of the state. I mean, if you're if you're going to have rights retained <v Catherine Roraback>by the people, certainly the right to just be be able to live your own life with sort <v Catherine Roraback>of a basic one. <v Speaker B>Advocates have contraceptive rights saw the Griswold decision as an historic <v Speaker B>achievement. <v David Bollier>The Griswold decision was a capstone to 40 years

<v David Bollier>of activism, starting with Margaret Sanger and Katharine Hepburn and <v David Bollier>the untold number of women who had agitated against the law. <v Speaker>[Help! by The Beatles plays] <v Speaker A>In the 1960s, contraception became a right, but <v Speaker A>abortion remained illegal under Connecticut's 1860 <v Speaker A>statute. <v Catherine Roraback>For the most part, abortions were performed by <v Catherine Roraback>non medical people in nonmedical settings. <v Catherine Roraback>They were performed with coathangers. They were were performed with all sorts of <v Catherine Roraback>desperate means, women who wanted to try to self induce <v Catherine Roraback>abortions. <v Speaker A>But the ban on legal abortion began to be attacked by two <v Speaker A>of the groups who had most strongly supported it a the century before, doctors

<v Speaker A>and feminists. <v David Musto>American physicians began calling for a liberalization of the very abortion <v David Musto>laws that their professional ancestors have worked so hard to achieve a century earlier. <v David Musto>And interestingly, Connecticut, again, was a leader in this movement which swept the <v David Musto>nation. But in a direction exactly opposite to that of the 1860 anti-abortion <v David Musto>law, perhaps the 1950s, emphasis on equality had something to do <v David Musto>with it, because increasingly it became very well known that well-to-do women <v David Musto>could afford an abortion and the poor could not. <v David Musto>Whatever the reason, by 1967, a poll of physicians indicated <v David Musto>that 87 percent favored some liberalization of the current anti-abortion <v David Musto>laws. <v Patricia Ireland>Interestingly, of course, it was the medical profession itself that played a major role <v Patricia Ireland>in making abortion legal again. <v Patricia Ireland>And we still have this generation of physicians now, although they are getting older, <v Patricia Ireland>who keep reminding us why they did that.

<v Patricia Ireland>How many infected and dying women they treated when they called Saturday <v Patricia Ireland>nights on the Saturday Night Massacre Because so many women would come <v Patricia Ireland>in with the results of illegal abortions. <v Gloria Steinem>I hope, too, that we put an end to the idea that this is not a political issue. <v Gloria Steinem>It is a political issue. We are the means of production. <v Gloria Steinem>And the state means to control our bodies. <v Gloria Steinem>We produce the soldiers. We produce the workers. <v Gloria Steinem>And they fear the loss of that control. <v Gloria Steinem>I first became aware of it in a way individually, because I <v Gloria Steinem>myself desperately needed an abortion and was in the position of terror <v Gloria Steinem>and fear and, you know, all the emotions that came when that was <v Gloria Steinem>illegal or not easily available. <v Gloria Steinem>But it wasn't until many years later when, as a reporter, I went to cover

<v Gloria Steinem>an abortion hearing. And it was the first time in my life that I've ever heard <v Gloria Steinem>women stand up. I or I had ever heard women stand up in public and tell <v Gloria Steinem>the truth. And as women told what it was like to have to <v Gloria Steinem>get an illegal abortion. Other women stood up in the audience and told their stories. <v Gloria Steinem>Tears streaming down their faces. It was an incredibly moving <v Gloria Steinem>experience and it was the basic life lesson of feminism, <v Gloria Steinem>which is we only learn the truth when we share the truth, when <v Gloria Steinem>we tell the true stories of our own lives. <v Speaker>[For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springstien plays] <v Speaker A>In Connecticut, an underground railroad for women seeking abortions <v Speaker A>was started by members of the local clergy. <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>In the earliest years, the only legal clinics and doctors <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>that we had as places to refer women were outside of the country.

<v Rev, Joan Forsberg>Puerto Rico. <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>England, Japan, they were all places where abortion was <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>legal once we began using medical facilities within <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>the United States, giving women the option of going to someplace that was <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>illegal. Then we had to instruct them even more fully. <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>If you're on the second floor, you need to look and see if you can possibly get out a <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>window, whether or not it would be safe. <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>You need to figure all the ways possible in case for any <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>reason. <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>The places [unclear] It was very cloak and dagger-ish <v Rev, Joan Forsberg>and very demeaning for women and frightening. <v Marilyn Seichter>In 1971, I was asked by a group of women attorneys <v Marilyn Seichter>to become one of the attorneys for <v Marilyn Seichter>a lawsuit to challenge the Connecticut abortion statute.

<v Marilyn Seichter>And at the time, the idea was <v Marilyn Seichter>because of Griswold establishing a right to privacy. <v Marilyn Seichter>The president Connecticut statute would be unconstitutional. <v Catherine Roraback>And it was to be all women. And we decided very early on that there'd only women lawyers. <v Catherine Roraback>There weren't many of us in those days. <v Catherine Roraback>But we got a group together and there were to be only women witnesses, <v Catherine Roraback>doctors and social workers and so forth. <v Catherine Roraback>And there was gonna be testimony. I mean, this is something that I felt very strongly <v Catherine Roraback>about. But if you're going to translate into <v Catherine Roraback>things who are meaningful to what was essentially an all male court system, <v Catherine Roraback>that you had to have people testifying about that. <v Catherine Roraback>What abortion was and what it meant to two women. <v Marilyn Seichter>We had women testifying about, you know, all the words they had gone through, all <v Marilyn Seichter>of the difficulties. You're going to foreign countries, botched abortions.

<v Marilyn Seichter>And they got on the stand and testify. I mean, they did not get any kind of then <v Marilyn Seichter>enormity. I mean, they they were on the line with their careers, their reputations, <v Marilyn Seichter>sometimes their marriages. <v Catherine Roraback>We ended up with somewhere between sixteen hundred and eighteen hundred plaintiffs. <v Catherine Roraback>And there was a sense of vitality and participation <v Catherine Roraback>in that case that I, I have never seen [unclear]. <v Speaker A>They won in the Connecticut courts, but the state then appealed to the U.S. <v Speaker A>Supreme Court, where challenges to abortion laws from all over the country <v Speaker A>were pending. One of them, the now famous Roe versus Wade, <v Speaker A>was brought by young women lawyers from Texas who base their case largely <v Speaker A>on the Griswold birth control decision. <v Sarah Weddington>Finding Griswold was exciting. <v Sarah Weddington>Griswold, obviously was a case where the state had made it illegal to use birth control. <v Sarah Weddington>And there was a line in the opinion that say that the right of privacy and <v Sarah Weddington>it was almost like a feeling of celebration when I found those words.

<v Speaker>This is NBC Nightly News. <v Garrick Utley>The court said in a seven to two decision that in the first three months of pregnancy, <v Garrick Utley>only the woman and her physician may decide whether she may have an abortion <v Garrick Utley>in the second three months. All the state may do is regulate abortion procedures. <v Garrick Utley>And only in the final three months of pregnancy can the state forbid abortion. <v Dr. Alan Guttamacher>Well, it means that January 22nd, 1973, <v Dr. Alan Guttamacher>will stand out as one of the great days for freedom <v Dr. Alan Guttamacher>and free choice. <v Dr. Alan Guttamacher>This allows a woman free choice, whether or not to remain pregnant. <v Dr. Alan Guttamacher>This is extraordinary. <v MSGR. Eugene Clark>How many millions of children prior to their birth will never live to see the light <v MSGR. Eugene Clark>of day because of the shocking action of the majority of the United States Supreme <v MSGR. Eugene Clark>Court today. <v MSGR. Eugene Clark>Whatever their legal rationale, seven men have made a tragic, utilitarian <v MSGR. Eugene Clark>judgment regarding who shall live and who shall die.

<v Speaker A>The majority decision in Roe v. <v Speaker A>Wade was based on the right of privacy doctrine first stated <v Speaker A>by the court in the Griswold case. <v Robert Bork>Roe is one of the worst decisions of this century. <v Robert Bork>Maybe the worst decision of the century, absolutely supported by nothing. <v Robert Bork>And they had to turn it back to the political process. <v Sarah Weddington>There are those people who say there is no right of privacy and there are others <v Sarah Weddington>who said what the people writing the Constitution were trying to do is keep government <v Sarah Weddington>out of our most personal aspects. <v Sarah Weddington>And so there is a difference of opinion. I think Bork is wrong. <v Speaker>Keep your eyes on The prize, hold on. <v Speaker>[unclear] save our babies, go to jail. <v Regina Smith>I basically became concerned when the Supreme Court <v Regina Smith>rendered the Roe v. Wade decision on January 22nd, 1973, <v Regina Smith>virtually all 50 states had laws on the books to protect the life <v Regina Smith>of the unborn child, with rare exceptions.

<v Regina Smith>And it was hard to believe that all of a sudden our society <v Regina Smith>that was OK to destroy an unborn child. <v Regina Smith>There were about three or four of us women who were pretty much, you know, again, we <v Regina Smith>were all about the same age, young mothers who thought <v Regina Smith>that we should try to do something in our own state to change <v Regina Smith>what was happening and to start finding other people who shared our concerns. <v Regina Smith>And that's how Pro-life Council of Connecticut became an organization. <v Regina Smith>Our real objective is in mind, always has been from day one was to get <v Regina Smith>our laws back into place that are going to protect unborn child. <v Regina Smith>I really thought a few years and we're going to turn this thing around. <v Speaker>[pro-life, pro-life] <v Speaker B>But in fact, for the next two decades, abortion remained a deeply divisive issue <v Speaker B>in Connecticut and throughout the country as a whole. <v Regina Smith>Well, basic biology tells us when life begins.

<v Regina Smith>It was outrageous for the high court to skirt around that issue <v Regina Smith>and leave it up to the philosophers and theologians. <v Regina Smith>Life begins at the moment of conception. It is when each and every one of our lives <v Regina Smith>began. It's as simple as that. <v Regina Smith>That's the beginning of life. <v Gloria Steinem>Reproductive freedom as a basic human right. <v Gloria Steinem>That is the right to decide when and whether to have children. <v Gloria Steinem>Some part of that reproductive freedom has been the basis of every women's <v Gloria Steinem>movement since time immemorial in every country and every culture. <v Gloria Steinem>Reproductive freedom is a basic human right, like freedom of speech. <v Gloria Steinem>We can't leave this basic right up to the whim of passing <v Gloria Steinem>bodies of state legislatures. <v Speaker>Ladies and gentlemen, Webster. <v Speaker B>In nineteen eighty nine. Connecticut once again was at the forefront <v Speaker B>of conflict over who shall control human reproduction. <v Speaker B>The US Supreme Court, in the Webster decision, let states put new conditions on

<v Speaker B>the right to abortion. <v Tom Brokaw>Today's ruling is the most significant since Roe vs. <v Tom Brokaw>Wade. The decision 16 years ago, legalizing abortion. <v Tom Brokaw>And while today's decision did not reverse that, it did return to the states more <v Tom Brokaw>authority to determine who gets an abortion and under what circumstances. <v Speaker B>Opponents of abortion saw an opportunity. <v Speaker B>In 1990, they proposed bills in Connecticut and 40 other states to <v Speaker B>regulate abortion. <v Regina Smith>The bills that we were concerned with that we wanted to see included in this <v Regina Smith>in legislation was, number one, that women who are contemplating <v Regina Smith>abortion be adequately informed of the risk involved <v Regina Smith>in the procedure as well as the alternative choices. <v Regina Smith>The second was a parental rights bill. <v Regina Smith>The third was a father's rights bill. <v Regina Smith>The other bill that we were very concerned about was <v Regina Smith>the protection of the unborn child, at least at the point of viability.

<v Speaker B>Abortion rights advocates pulled together a coalition of 60 groups to <v Speaker B>draft legislation after Webster was decided. <v Richard Blumenthal>I became very alarmed that very possibly <v Richard Blumenthal>the court might overturn Roe v. <v Richard Blumenthal>Wade and essentially Connecticut women would be totally unprotected. <v Richard Blumenthal>Indeed, we had at the time our books the criminal statute that <v Richard Blumenthal>would have been in effect and would have criminalized <v Richard Blumenthal>anyone who either had an abortion or who sought one <v Richard Blumenthal>or who provided one. <v Ct Legislature>But what we do here and what we say here and the vote that we put <v Ct Legislature>up on that board becomes part of the history of the state of Connecticut. <v Speaker B>The legislature's Judiciary Committee produced a bill with something for each side. <v Anita Allen>The Connecticut statute worked a remarkable compromise. <v Anita Allen>It gave everybody something to one side. <v Anita Allen>It gave the right to safe medical abortion on demand.

<v Anita Allen>The other side, it gave the right to restrict abortion after viability. <v Anita Allen>After about the 24th week, a pregnancy. <v Anita Allen>In that instance, only women whose lives or safety are right with can obtain abortions. <v Anita Allen>It also gave the right of teenage abortion to women of Connecticut, <v Anita Allen>but it limited in a certain way. Only abortions, which are preceded by counseling, <v Anita Allen>are permitted. <v Speaker B>To the astonishment of many. The legislature passed this Connecticut compromise <v Speaker B>with the support of more than nine tenths of each house while it had the enthusiastic <v Speaker B>support of abortion rights advocates. <v Speaker B>It was not opposed by the Catholic Church or the Pro-life Council of Connecticut. <v Rep. Richard Tulisano>The victory was that people began to talk to each other. <v Rep. Richard Tulisano>The victory on both sides was only they began to discuss issues, they disagreed <v Rep. Richard Tulisano>with each other, understood each other. <v Rep. Richard Tulisano>An open dialog with each other, and that was the victory. <v Rep. Richard Tulisano>I think a classical political decision, not a theological decision.

<v Rep. Richard Tulisano>And it's not a. <v Rep. Richard Tulisano>It's not trying to be victorious. It's a classic merican pragmatic <v Rep. Richard Tulisano>view of resolving the resolving a difficult issue. <v Speaker B>Throughout history, the rules and beliefs governing human reproduction have <v Speaker B>changed repeatedly. <v Speaker B>Abortion and contraception went from being widely accepted in the 18th century <v Speaker B>to completely outlawed in the 19th century, in the 20th century. <v Speaker B>Contraception again became widely accepted. <v Speaker B>Abortion became legal, but remained controversial. <v Speaker A>Such deeply divisive issues can challenge the stability, even the survival

<v Speaker A>of a democratic society. <v Speaker A>Can we reconcile our conflicting moral certainties with our need to <v Speaker A>live together as members of one society? <v David Musto>The United States started with a deep moral conflict. <v David Musto>Slavery that resulted in a great civil war that <v David Musto>caused more American casualties than all other American wars put together. <v David Musto>We've also confronted diametrically opposite moral convictions <v David Musto>about alcohol that led to prohibition in Connecticut in the eighteen <v David Musto>fifties as well as the nineteen twenties. <v David Musto>Issues like abortion that seem finally settled <v David Musto>only arise again many decades later. <v David Musto>Few of our bitter controversies are ever quietly <v David Musto>put to rest. <v Guest>Granted that we have to look back at where we came from.

<v Guest>Seventy five Kneeland street, the combat zone being scared every <v Guest>night, picking up your car. <v Guest>That's where we came from. <v Guest>That's who we are. Let's always think back where we came from. <v Guest>Let's not look at the awards that those give us. <v Guest>It's nice recognition. <v Guest>You also have to note that we are is where we came from. <v Guest>And that means we can never take any moment where we are for granted. <v Guest>I should mention that we also organizationally must evolve. <v Guest>We don't have sufficient infrastructure to do all the things we need to do. <v Guest>Fences in the case of the surgical field. <v Guest>We have to become a participant in a very broad area of <v Guest>market in which we today don't participate. <v Guest>The surgical market. <v Guest>There are large corporations like attack on a U.S.

<v Guest>surgical in that market. <v Guest>The HA program, if successful, will be powerful enough to create <v Guest>a major new presence in that market. <v Guest>I think next year we going to do something among us <v Guest>and figure out a way to create a presence in the surgical market <v Guest>so that, then, we can start to innovate that market that we have a way <v Guest>to do that. <v Guest>We also did recently, two days ago. <v Guest>That has not yet been broadly announced, all of you know, recreated <v Guest>the therapeutics division. <v Guest>We have a diagnostic division which was created a number of years back. <v Guest>We don't-