Mention his name on the phone and Betty Friedan’s gravelly voice turns into liquid vitriol. Then she hangs up.
In the peculiar jargon of condemnation, Catholic Church leaders say they pray for his soul. And their lay allies in the anti-abortion movement, who pummel him with fists and Bibles, teach their children that the former choirboy is nothing less than the devil incarnate.
So who is Bill Baird? And what has he done to become just about the only person who can get both sides of the abortion battle to set aside their hatreds and unite in a common cause, even if it’s only their mutual antipathy to him?
The vilification of Baird, whose unapologetic zealotry leads him to criticize even his ideological allies, provides a glimpse into the passions that have laid waste to the middle ground in the fight over abortion. But Baird’s struggle also is a story of atonement and how he turned his cause into his life, sacrificing even his family on the altar of his beliefs.
“If I were assassinated, I know what the movement would do: They’d say, `He was a great warrior, a great fighter. He withstood the test of time,’ ” laments Baird, whose clinic here was one of the first in the country to offer abortion counseling openly. “But now, while I’m still alive, they won’t take my hand or even let me stand by them.”
Baird is the father of the abortion-rights movement. It wasn’t planned. He came to his mission in 1963 when he was at Harlem Hospital and found a woman screaming in the hall, with a coat hanger protruding from her uterus.
“She died in my arms,” Baird recalls. He’s told the story thousands, if not tens of thousands, of times and it’s almost rote. But it was his epiphany, and tears still well up at the memory.
One of six children in a strict Lutheran family, he grew up devout, but a bully, in Brooklyn’s slums. When he earned cookies in school for his posture, he brought them home to his younger sister, Myra. And he willingly fought to protect his older sister, Louise, who died from a cerebral hemorrhage when he was 9.
After his sister’s death, his trust and faith in God were tempered by doubt. Almost 50 years later, when a child suggested praying for Baird’s severely ill grandson, he snapped that only doctors could help.
“I told them if there was a God, what kind of God would give a little kid cancer?” he recalls. “An audience member got up and said, `I know why your grandson got cancer. God’s punishing you.’ It went through me like a knife.”
Baird dropped out of New York Medical College in 1963 when he was forced to choose between books and food for his three children. But the Harlem woman’s death made him a guerrilla doctor. He bought a dilapidated truck, converted it into a mobile counseling center, the Plan Van, and in his free time began distributing birth-control information in New York’s poorest neighborhoods.
That led to a 1965 arrest on charges of violating state laws restricting the dissemination of such information. Ultimately, the charges were dropped. But while the case was instrumental in relaxing New York’s restrictive birth-control laws, it also led to his dismissal from his job as the clinical director of a pharmaceutical company. The only work he could find was as a security guard in a mental hospital, for $2 an hour.
His setbacks only made him more obstinate. During a 1967 speech at Boston University, he was arrested on charges of giving a female student a condom and a package of contraceptive foam, a calculated challenge to Massachusetts’ “chastity” statute, which barred distribution of such materials to unmarried people.
Planned Parenthood, in the first of several confrontations that Baird never has forgiven, publicly derided him as an “embarrassment” and said there was “nothing to be gained” by his case. He was convicted and the judge, accusing him of being a “menace to the nation,” sentenced him as a felon to three months in jail. He served 36 days until his release pending appeal.
The case was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which initially declined to hear it but succumbed to the persistence of Justice William O. Douglas.
“The teachings of Baird and Galileo may be of a different order, but the suppression of either is equally repugnant,” Douglas later wrote in his book, “The Douglas Papers.” The court’s decision, handed down in 1972, extended access to contraception to everyone.
The following year, in Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that made abortion legal, the majority opinion cited the Baird precedent five times.
The tide in favor of abortion rights ebbed in the 1989 decision, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, that essentially allowed states to impose restrictions on abortion. Baird says the ruling, which galvanized supporters of abortion rights, also led to what amounted to his excommunication from the movement.
“It organized women,” he says. “They circled the wagons.”
But most men, he contends, were excluded.
After 30 years on the ramparts, the crusader, 60, who describes himself as “the sexually incorrect Joan of Arc,” clearly is physically exhausted and financially spent. He says he lives on $350 a week and has no insurance. His back hurts constantly.
Baird has been estranged from his wife, Evelyn, and their five children since he moved them out of state after receiving death threats in 1971.
He has been shot at in his home, punched and pummeled. In 1979, an unemployed drifter carrying a jug of gasoline and a flaming torch walked into his clinic, which was crowded with 35 patients and 15 staff members, and burned it to the ground.
He opened another clinic in a poor neighborhood here. Last September, chemicals were poured down the elevator shaft, sending noxious fumes through the building and making several people ill. Two months ago, a fire hose was turned on, flooding several floors.
“I think I’ve contributed something of significance to the freedom of millions of women,” he says. “But now society says it doesn’t want to know me.
“My life is sad,” he says. “I wish I could tell you it’s happy.”
