Bill Baird and the Struggle for Abortion Rights in the USA

Abstract

I was very interested to see that on the front of your issue ‘‘Abortion: women decide’’ [RHM 11(19) May 2002] you had a photograph of a large historical poster of the Parent’s Aid Society in New York. This organisation was founded and run for many years by one of the characters of the USA pro-choice movement – Bill Baird. It led to me ringing him after a number of years of being out of contact. He told me he was still active and picketing the anti-choice forces. He has also been invited to address the medical school staff at the local university. He railed against Bush’s attempts to introduce chastity and impose more severe restrictions on abortion. Baird has achieved a great many things during his lifetime. Probably the most notable was his challenge in the 1960s to the Massachusetts state law which prohibited the provision of contraceptive devices to single people. The law was strange in that condoms were sold openly. However, this was justified on the grounds that they were sold as a preventative against venereal disease. Baird gave a can of foam to a teenage single student at Boston University in the presence of a number of police officers, who promptly arrested him, and in due course he was given a prison sentence. This he exploited to the greatest degree by having his wife parade outside the prison with his four small children, who wanted their daddy back. The case eventually wended its way to the US Supreme Court and in 1972 in the case of Baird v. Eisenstadt established the rights of individuals to use birth control on the grounds of privacy. It was argued that a couple were not an entity but two individuals who both had the right to ensure that the government did not interfere in matters so fundamental as the decision whether or not to have children. This decision was quoted six times in the 1973 Roe v. Wade judgement that legalised abortion in the USA. Later in Baird v. Bellotti, Baird went to the Supreme Court on two further occasions challenging the rights of states to restrict the rights of the under-18s. In the end, this led to states being able to impose some restrictions; however, a number of concessions were gained. I know of no other individual who has been to the US Supreme Court three times. I taped an interview with Baird in 1969, and he told me that he had set up an underground network for abortion provision. He said he was usually able to get the doctor’s costs down from US$600 to around $300 but even at this level the cost of an abortion was about twice what it would be 15 years later. He told me hemade women sign a statement as follows: