Birth control (for anyone, and up to and including married couples) was not necessarily illegal before Griswold and 1965. Rather, state laws that restricted access to contraception weren’t declared unconstitutional before that decision. That’s a big difference, because the law in CT that sparked the decision was considered much more restrictive than others that were in place at the time. Also, Griswold itself only declared those laws as applied to married couples, so laws restricting access for unmarried persons weren’t declared unconstitutional until Eisenstadt v. Baird, in 1972.

The same is true for abortion- while Roe v. Wade declared a number of state laws restricting abortion unconstitutional, at least a couple of states had legalized abortion before 1973. My mother had a legal abortion in NY before Roe, for example.

My colleague Judith wrote an excellent piece on Dirty Dancing from a Jewish girl’s perspective, if you’re interested. http://jwablog.jwa.org/swayze At the Jewish Women’s Archive we tend to look at things through a Jewish lens, it was wonderful to be reminded of this other angle.