More than six years before Estelle Griswold and Fowler Harper launched Poe v. Ullman, and more than forty years before the trio of Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter guaranteed that the legacy of Kit Hepburn, of Griswold, and of Roe v. Wade would be enshrined beside Brown for all time in America’s constitutional pantheon, Yale’s Harold Lasswell stated the basic truth as clearly as anyone ever would: “The presumption in favor of privacy follows from our respect for freedom of choice, for autonomy, for self-direction on the part of everyone.”
Constitutionally, the basic principle can be succinctly yet completely stated in just eleven words: “The right to privacy is inherent in the right to liberty.”
And, just as basically, as Fowler Harper said a full decade before undertaking Poe, the law “is not changed by argument. It is changed by necessity.”
“Except for critical periods,” Harper stated, “the rule is one of inertia. The old values are encrusted in the law until they are literally forced out by the sheer necessity of events.”
More than thirty years after Jean and Marvin Durning volunteered to be the initial “Roes,” the “Roes” in Poe, Jean explained their willingness to become the first of all the seemingly anonymous plaintiffs who would lead to the other Roe, in a phrase that spoke for Kit Hepburn, for Estelle Griswold, for Lee Buxton, and for all those who would come after: “This was something that we thought was right.”
And more than thirty years after Ruth and Bob “Oldendorf” became the first “Does” in Poe, Bob explained the deeply personal bond that they in their lifelong anonymity had now for two decades felt between Poe and Roe: “It was a necessary thing for everyone. That’s why I went along—for people who didn’t have health problems, but for whatever reasons they had. It’s up to the person themselves.”1