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.
We arrived at the venue to find 34-page packets of news clippings about his work, photocopied and prepared by Baird himself, complete with underlined passages. We then soon learned that he is the kind of man who would, and did, go outside with a giant pro-choice sign to confront the anti-choice protesters in front of the building “just to see where they were coming from.” When Baird came back inside to start his presentation, he told us (to great laughter) that when they started talking to him about how “you can’t kill the pre-born,” he said that if fetuses are “pre-born” “then we’re all pre-dead!” And yet, when an anti-choice activist interrupted the presentation to give Baird a copy of an anti-abortion film, he remained calm and urged the rest of the audience to do the same.
At first, Baird came off as just a bit outlandish and free-spirited. And he did, undoubtedly, have many fascinating things to say with which I adamantly agreed. He is a compelling speaker, if a bit prone to rambling and going off on tangents. The problem with Baird was that the more he kept talking, the less there was to like.
He started off by talking about his history and what drove him to work as a reproductive rights activist in the first place. He told a heartbreaking story about when a woman came into the hospital where he worked, bleeding out from a piece of a coat hanger stuck inside her cervix, lamenting the children she was leaving behind as she died in front of him. And he said, very powerfully, that this woman, and the many women like her, weren’t even dying because they couldn’t get access to safe abortions. They were dying because they didn’t have access to birth control to avoid the pregnancy in the first place.
Baird talked about a time when unwed women were put into prison — because intercourse outside of marriage was illegal, and officials felt that by jailing single (and I’m betting poor and black) pregnant women, they couldn’t have sex anymore and the welfare roles would therefore be lowered. He talked about being asked by a friend to do something about birth control access, and initially refusing, knowing that the sentence for distributing information about birth control in Massachusetts was 10 years. He talked about changing his mind, because he had seen so many women suffer. Baird got arrested on purpose. And he claimed to recognize early on in his crusade that if he was successful in having his case heard in front of the Supreme Court, and if he won, it would lay the groundwork for the legalization of abortion.
In one of the most compelling moments of the night, he held up an old newspaper clipping which read “Mother Begs for Birth Control,” and asked the audience “why should any woman have to beg for medical care?”
But he also talked openly, and at length, about his status as a fringe and radical member of the reproductive rights movement, and how he was shunned by the major organizations and feminists alike. Planned Parenthood, NOW, the ACLU and Allen Guttmacher all refused to back him with his case. Planned Parenthood called him “embarrassing” and said that there was “nothing to be gained” from his case; the ACLU said “we don’t think the case has constitutional merits.” (Quotes taken from packet of new clippings provided by Baird.) Planned Parenthood, at the time, also opposed abortion rights and thought that Baird was truly radical for supporting them. He was, in fact, rejected by the feminist and reproductive health movements and left on his own for all intensive purposes. And he is still pissed.
I do, actually, think that it’s important to remember our history. And there’s a lot of ugly stuff in there. So I don’t exactly begrudge him for calling out those organizations that ignored and rejected him. And I even understand why he is hurt and angry, and think that to some extent, he is right.
I also couldn’t help but ask myself over and over again why he was rejected. And, namely, why did feminist Robin Morgan (along with other feminists, according to the news clippings) call him a male-supremacist/chauvinist? They seem like fair questions. And it also seems that there’s no one easy answer.
Well, Baird thinks that there is one. Baird stated that “there’s a lot of sexist people” in the feminist movement. He meant sexist against men. Later, he also stated that he is an “equalist,” and thinks we all ought to be. In other words, Baird thinks that his penis is the reason that he was kept out of the movement, and rejected despite the strong advancements he helped to bring about.
Of course, anyone who starts railing about sexism against men and “equalism” instantly gets on my bad side. As I said, the more he went on, the less there was to like. This is the case even though I don’t doubt that it’s at least partially true that his maleness kept him out of the movement’s good graces.
What are the other (majority) parts? Well, that’s where it starts to get interesting.
According to the articles provided, many think that Baird’s seeming extremism made feminists wary that he was an interloper attempting to make their cause look ridiculous (Betty Friedan insinuated that he was a C.I.A. agent). In another article provided, it’s suggested, quite interestingly, that he was rejected by them because the mainstream movement was white and middle-class, and Baird focused on issues facing women who were poor and of color. I found this explanation to be quite compelling, actually, knowing that white second wave feminists and organizations like Planned Parenthood did largely ignore the reproductive rights needs of poor women of color. Even though Baird seemingly didn’t focus his efforts on issues like the right to parent, he did seem to take a lot of rights that white feminists were working to procure and attempted to extend them to the women outside that circle.
But it also seems to me that Bill Baird got his ass in trouble because he saw himself as a one-man show and only sought out the help of women who had been doing this work for a long time when it was convenient for him. He didn’t speak once of consulting with feminists or other reproductive rights activists a single time before taking action. And I’m not just talking about mainstream, white feminists — he didn’t speak of working with women of color, on whom his efforts were supposedly focused, either. (Nor, of course, did he accuse the movement of racism. Only sexism against men.)
He also did, in many respects, come across as quite clueless. One article he provided quotes him as saying that Gloria Steinem wouldn’t even thank him for giving her the right to use birth control. And though I don’t doubt at all that his experiences in jail were horrific, and have sympathy for what he went through, it did feel rather insensitive when he started asking an audience of 95% women how they would feel if they had to live under the constant fear of rape.
In short, his tone when discussing these issues struck me as arrogant. And he struck me as clueless about how feminism should be a women’s movement. I strongly believe that feminism needs male allies to succeed. I believe that men can be feminists. But it seems pretty clear that when men start wanting the spotlight and all the credit, there’s a problem. Baird expressed absolutely no appreciation for the work of women before him or after him. Baird has clearly not been given credit that he deserves, but he also appears to want a lot more than that. He seems to me to really, really want the credit for work that was being done by women for many, many years.
Remember, earlier last year, when Hillary Clinton got herself in trouble for ascribing too much credit to LBJ for civil rights victories? While no analogy will ever be perfect, I personally saw a parallel. Yeah, LBJ did something good. Yes, if he hadn’t done the right thing, civil rights victories probably would have taken significantly longer to come about. But he’s also not the hero of the civil rights movement. No, that would go to the men and women of color who were beaten, killed, arrested, sprayed with fire hoses, etc., who did the leg work to secure their own freedom. Bill Baird put in a good amount of leg work himself, but he didn’t do it all. And he came across as yet another instance of a white guy trying to get all the credit for liberating an oppressed people of which he was not a member.
Baird said at one point during the evening that “you may not like how I did it but I did it the only way I knew how and as effectively as I could.” And I thought: “did you ever once think to ask those already doing this work how you could have been most effective?” In addition to Clinton’s LBJ gaffe, I’m also reminded heavily of the way that white feminists have been rightfully criticized on many occasions by women of color for acting before consulting, trying to take a lead on other people’s issues, getting messiah complexes and not shutting up and listening. I’m reminded of many, many people, in other words, who have found it really difficult to act as an ally because they were unable to examine their privilege and check it at the door.
At the same time, Baird railed angrily against the arrogance of men for pretending as though they could know the pain and agony that women have endured as the result of oppression. He railed against anyone telling women what they can do with their own bodies; he similarly berated straight people (he himself is straight) for telling gay people who they can and can’t fuck, and who they can and can’t marry.
And I didn’t doubt for a moment that Baird was sincere in his convictions towards furthering women’s place in the world. I also don’t doubt for a moment that Baird’s actions were ultimately good intentioned, and in the end just good overall. Further, I think that the other reasons cited above — the white feminist movement’s lack of interest in racial justice, concerns that he was not sincere, and unwillingness to get involved in incredibly controversial issues — likely played something of a role in Baird’s ultimate rejection. I even agree with my friend Betty who said after the presentation that every movement needs its fringe people to keep them honest. And we should, I think, thank Bill Baird for his service to the movement, however clumsy.
But that doesn’t change my conflicting view of him. He didn’t make me blink any less rapidly when he declared that we’re fighting a “holy war” against anti-choice forces, and when he suggested that we should sue the Catholic Church (something about lobbying on behalf of a foreign nation, the Vatican, inside the U.S.). It doesn’t make me particularly like his tactic of picketing outside of churches while carrying a giant cross that says “free women from the oppression of the cross.” It doesn’t change my criticisms above regarding how he interacted with feminism.
And by the time he got to asking the audience to help him get speaking gigs because he needs the money, or to write him letters thanking him for his service because it would make him feel better, I didn’t know whether to feel really angry at him, grateful to him, or really sorry for him.
I feel a lot of things at once. My mind is forced to stress for the one millionth time how few things in life are cut and dry. Bill Baird seems to be a walking reminder.