The other night, for the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I attended an event in Rochester, NY with reproductive rights activist Bill Baird. Until this event, I had never really heard of Bill Baird. I had heard of his famous Supreme Court case, Baird v. Eisenstadt, though I couldn’t cite it by name. But upon learning who Baird was, I was immediately intrigued.
Who is Bill Baird? Well, as stated, he was the defendant in Baird v. Eisenstadt, a very important case that not many people know. Baird v. Eisenstadt built off of the famous Griswold v. Connecticut case, which said that the right to privacy means it is unconstitutional to outlaw contraception for married people, to rule that the same was true for unmarried people. The case came up after Baird was arrested for giving contraceptive foam to a single 19-year-old woman (who was, at the time, considered a minor). The decision contains the famous and significant line “If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” Importantly, its conclusions regarding privacy are the basis for the Roe v. Wade decision, where it is quoted several times, as well as the gay rights ruling Lawrence v. Texas.
Baird has been arrested 8 times in 5 different states for lecturing on birth control, including once where he was accused of endangering a minor because there was a 14-month-old infant in the audience. He claims both to have introduced the first gay rights bill in 1969, and to have set up the nation’s first abortion clinic, illegally. He is on anti-choice hit lists, has had a bullet come through his living room window, and had his health clinic firebombed by an anti-choice zealot. He was also the defendant in the important Belotti v. Baird Supreme Court decision, which struck down a strict Massachusetts parental consent laws for minors seeking abortions. Throughout all of it, he was refused the help of reproductive rights organizations, and publicly mocked and condemned not only by them but by prominent feminists such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.
I learned all of this during his talk, and much, much more, which I am still turning over in my head.
Baird is, in a word, eccentric. Of course, there’s a lot more to say about him than that. After all, if the only thing you can say about a person is “he’s eccentric,” you’re almost certainly using the word wrong.
Read More…Read More…