Browsing through a stack of almost-biographical newspaper and magazine clips in front of him, Bill Baird, at times, expressed frustration.
The abortion-rights activist — who police arrested on Boston University’s campus almost 40 years ago after he illegally distributed birth control to a 19-year-old during a lecture — has come a long way from the U.S. Supreme Court to Commonwealth Avenue.
The documents in front of him — among them a spread in LIFE — illustrate the history of a man who says he has sought to ensure women’s rights to reproductive freedom, despite past opposition.
“Here I am, 75 years and still fighting for the rights of the public to reproductive health care,” he said, reflecting on his lifetime’s work.
Baird, known by his supporters as the “father of the abortion movement,” will return to his alma mater of Brooklyn College today to speak about, among other things, Gov. Deval Patrick and New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s official proclamation to call today “Right to Privacy Day,” acknowledging not only the historical 1973 Roe v. Wade case that made abortion legal, but to mark the 35th anniversary of another case — Baird v. Eisenstadt — that directly impacted the final decision on Roe v. Wade that Baird was directly involved with.
Baird challenged the Constitutional validity of the lack of abortion law during the late 1960s. The founder of an abortion clinic in Hempstead, N.Y., he watched in 1979 an abortion protester set on fire the two-story building where he oversaw licensed physicians perform more than 4,000 abortions in one year.
In Baird v. Eisenstadt, the 1972 case stated an unmarried woman could legally use contraceptives. The case was passed after a 1965 case, Griswold v. Connecticut, legalized birth control but excluded unmarried women. Baird’s case is quoted six times in the Roe v. Wade case.
Almost 2,500 audience members heard Baird’s lecture April 6, 1967, as he spoke on the importance of abortion and birth control. Almost 680 BU students invited him to appear at BU, as reported in an Oct. 17, 2002 Daily Free Press article.
Baird served a three-month jail sentence that started Feb. 21, 1970 for charges of illegally giving birth control to a minor, which at the time was anyone under 21, Baird said.
“I had to deal with rats in my cell, bugs in my food . . . I endured all of that and then to be told, ‘There’s nothing to be gained by what he’s doing,'” he said. “If I didn’t love you, my sister, or care about you, my sister, I would have turned around and gone right home.”
Massachusetts’ abortions statute in 1966 stated that selling, distributing or advertising contraceptives was a criminal offense, according to a Jan. 12, 1970 Springfield News article.
Almost 40 years after his historic arrest, Baird still travels to different parts of the country to talk about the importance of women’s right to abortion and birth control. He said he has yet to be invited back to the BU campus to speak, and he said he would like the opportunity to return to the place where he started it all.
Still, Baird is concerned about how history may or may not remember him.
“I always believed: You challenge the opposition, you put them on the defensive,” he said.