hooray for birth control!

Today is the 40th anniversary of legal birth control in the United States.... On June 7, 1965, the US Supreme Court -- ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut -- struck down state laws that made birth control by married couples illegal.

It was the first Supreme Court case that provided constitutional protection for the use of birth control. The landmark ruling came five years after the FDA approved the birth control pill and 49 years after Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States.

It wasn't until 1972 that a court ruling expanded the protection of birth control to unmarried women.