Bill Baird (activist)

Bill Baird
Baird picketing National Right to Life Convention in June 2012
Born	(1932-06-20) June 20, 1932 (age 84) Brooklyn, New York
Occupation	reproductive rights advocate, speaker, social reformer
Nationality	United States
Subject	women's rights, reproductive rights
Notable awards	Humanist Pioneer Award
Website
www.prochoiceleague.org

Bill Baird (born June 20, 1932) is a reproductive rights pioneer, called by some media the "father" of the birth control and abortion-rights movement. He was jailed eight times in five states in the 1960s for lecturing on abortion and birth control. Baird is believed to be the first and only non-lawyer in American history with three Supreme Court victories.

In 1967 hundreds of students at Boston University petitioned Baird to challenge a Massachusetts law that prohibited providing contraception to unmarried persons. On April 6, 1967, he gave a lecture at Boston University, during which he gave a condom and a package of over-the-counter contraceptive foam to a female college student. He was immediately arrested and eventually jailed. His appeal of his conviction culminated in the 1972 Supreme Court decision Eisenstadt v. Baird, which established the right of unmarried persons to possess contraception on the same basis as married couples. U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. wrote in that decision: "If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as to whether to bear or beget a child."Eisenstadt v. Baird has been described as "among the most influential in the United States during the entire century by any manner or means of measurement".

Baird grew up in Brooklyn, and was raised a strict Lutheran.

Bill Baird's advocacy for reproductive rights began in 1963 after witnessing the death of an unmarried mother of nine children who died of a self-inflicted coat hanger abortion. As the clinical director of EMKO, a birth control manufacturer, he had been coordinating research at Harlem Hospital when she stumbled into the corridor, covered with blood from the waist down.

In 1963, he began giving away EMKO birth control foam samples including at malls where his activities often met with religious opposition. He was threatened with arrest for distributing free birth control foam in Hempstead, New York. Baird founded the Parents Aid Society and later distributed contraceptives in a converted delivery truck that he called the “Plan Van.” In 1966 Baird established the first birth control club on a college campus at Hofstra University.

He was sent to jail for teaching birth control and distributing abortion literature in New York, New Jersey, and Wisconsin. Baird's punishment galvanized feminists like Anne Koedt to speak out in his defense. On May 13, 1965, he challenged New York's anti-birth control statute, law 1142. He was arrested in Hempstead, NY and jailed for teaching birth control out of his mobile "Plan Van." Baird's challenges led to the legalization of birth control in New York. Planned Parenthood President Alan Guttmacher criticized Baird and stated that Baird was "overenthusiastic and every couple seeking birth control information should seek a physician.”