Carey v. Population Services International
The Supreme Court struck down a New York law that banned selling nonprescription contraceptives to anyone under 16, restricted adult sales to licensed pharmacists only, and prohibited all advertising or display of contraceptives.
The ruling extended the constitutional right to make personal decisions about childbearing to cover access to contraceptives themselves — not just the choice to use them — and limited how far states can go in restricting both adults' and minors' ability to obtain birth control or truthful information about it.
“Restrictions on the distribution of contraceptives clearly burden the freedom to make such decisions.”
Explaining why limiting access to contraceptives burdens the same privacy right as banning their use.
How it got here: A three-judge federal district court declared the New York law unconstitutional and blocked its enforcement; state officials appealed directly to the Supreme Court.
The Case in Depth
What happened
New York made it a crime to sell contraceptives to anyone under 16, restricted adult sales to licensed pharmacists, and banned all advertising or display of contraceptives. A mail-order company selling nonmedical contraceptives from North Carolina, along with a family-planning organization, a minister running a venereal-disease prevention program, and others, sued New York officials, arguing the law violated their constitutional rights.
The question before the Court
Could New York make it a crime to sell contraceptives to anyone under 16, limit adult sales to licensed pharmacists, and ban all contraceptive advertising?
Why it matters
Retailers, mail-order companies, and pharmacies gained clearer freedom to sell and advertise nonprescription contraceptives, and minors gained a constitutionally protected path to obtain them despite state objections. The decision also strengthened protection for truthful commercial advertising, making it harder for states to suppress lawful information about legal products.
What changes now
This is a final merits decision, so New York's total advertising ban, its under-16 restriction, and its pharmacist-only rule are permanently unenforceable as applied to nonprescription contraceptives. The Court left open narrower forms of regulation \u2014 such as limits on distribution outlets like vending machines, or content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions on advertising \u2014 which were not before it and remain open for future cases.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether states may regulate consensual sexual behavior by minors or adults, whether states may limit distribution through specific outlets like vending machines, or whether time, place, and manner restrictions on contraceptive advertising would be constitutional.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Powell
Justice Powell agreed only that the mail-order company had standing and that the pharmacist-only rule and total advertising ban must fall, but on narrower grounds. He argued the majority wrongly extended strict, compelling-interest review to all state regulation touching sexual matters and minors, contended the pharmacist limit failed only because the under-16 ban itself was unsound, and would have allowed measures like requiring parental distribution or narrowly tailored advertising limits.
Concurrence — Justice Stevens
Justice Stevens agreed with the outcome but rejected treating a minor's contraceptive rights as parallel to a pregnant minor's abortion right. He viewed New York's under-16 ban as irrational 'propaganda' that increased the very harms — pregnancy and disease — it claimed to prevent, calling it a deprivation of liberty without due process, while stressing the advertising ruling leaves room for content-based limits aimed at reducing offensiveness.
Concurrence — Justice White
Justice White joined the standing, pharmacist, and advertising holdings but concurred only in the result on the under-16 ban, resting that vote solely on the State's failure to show the restriction actually reduced minors' sexual activity. He emphasized the ruling does not address laws against premarital sex and agreed a minor's claimed right to use contraceptives over parental and state objection would be frivolous.
Dissent — Justice Rehnquist
“There comes a point when endless and ill-considered extension of principles originally formulated in quite different cases produces such an indefensible result that no logic chopping can possibly make the fallacy of the result more obvious.”Rehnquist's core objection to how far the majority extended prior privacy precedents.
Justice Rehnquist argued the majority stretched precedent past any defensible limit, turning cases about marital privacy and abortion into a constitutional right for commercial vendors to market contraceptives to minors. He would have upheld New York's power under its police power to legislate against promiscuous sexual activity among unmarried minors and would have reversed the district court.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first confirmed that the mail-order company had standing to sue, because the law directly restricted its business and it could assert the privacy rights of the customers it could no longer reach.
- The Court then held that the constitutional right of personal privacy — the freedom to make important decisions about one's own life without unjustified government interference — covers decisions about whether to bear or beget a child, and that this includes access to the means of contraception, not merely the choice to use it once obtained.
- Because restricting access to contraceptives burdens that decision much as an outright ban on use would, the Court applied the same demanding test used for direct bans on personal decisions of this kind: the restriction must serve a compelling government interest and be narrowly tailored to it.
- Limiting adult sales to licensed pharmacists failed this test because the State's stated goals — quality control, discouraging youths from selling the products, and easing enforcement — were neither compelling nor actually advanced by the pharmacist requirement.
- The ban on distributing contraceptives to those under 16 also failed, because minors share the same underlying privacy interest (though subject to somewhat lesser protection than adults), and the State's theory that scarcity would deter sexual activity was unsupported by evidence and had already been rejected in analogous abortion and marital-privacy cases.
- The total ban on advertising and display of contraceptives could not survive First Amendment scrutiny, because a State's discomfort with a subject does not justify completely suppressing truthful information about an entirely lawful product.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Griswold v. Connecticut (381 U.S. 479)
Reinterpreted more broadly as protecting all childbearing decisions, not just married couples' use of contraceptives.
Reaffirms Eisenstadt v. Baird (405 U.S. 438)
Relied on as establishing that contraception decisions are protected equally for married and unmarried people.
Reaffirms Virginia Pharmacy Bd. v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council (425 U.S. 748)
Applied to bar New York from completely suppressing truthful advertising about a lawful product.