SUFFOLK CLOSEUP : Suffolk County's History Includes The Fight For Abortion

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

A decision by the U.S. Supreme Court involving a longtime Suffolk County person—Bill Baird—was at the base of its subsequent Roe v. Wade decision which legalized abortion in the United States. Now, Roe v. Wade is likely to be overturned by a court majority. A draft opinion leaked to Politico written by Justice Samuel Alioto sets the stage for it.

And Baird, long a resident of Centerport in Huntington Town, who after death threats and the firebombing of one of his birth control/abortion clinics on Long Island has lived in another state, was expressing his outrage to me last week.

The three Trump nominees to the Supreme Court—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—should, said Baird, be “removed from office” for testifying that Roe v. Wade was established precedent when they underwent confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “They lied,” said Baird. “All they wanted to do was to get into office and prevent women from getting abortions.”

Baird began battling for legalized abortion after, in 1963, as the clinical director of EMKO, a manufacturer of birth control products, he was at Harlem Hospital “coordinating research, and “I heard the scream of a young African-American woman covered with blood” from the waist down. She was bleeding caused by “a piece of coat hanger” used in a self-inflicted abortion. The unmarried woman, who already had nine children, “died in my arms.”

He was to establish the Parents Aid Society, and later the Pro-Choice League, and be jailed eight times in five states for advocating birth control and legal abortion.

In 1967, students at Boston University sent Baird a petition asking him to challenge the Massachusetts’ “Crimes Against Chastity, Decency, Morality and Good Order” law. He gave a presentation at the university attended by 1,500 students in which he gave a female student a condom and a package of contraceptive foam. Police immediately “swooped in” and he was arrested as a felon, convicted and sentenced to three months in jail.

Thomas Eisenstadt was to become the sheriff of another Suffolk County—Suffolk County, Massachusetts—so Baird’s challenge of the Massachusetts law was titled Baird v. Eisenstadt. In 1972, Supreme Court Justice John J. Brennan, Jr. wrote the decision in that case stating it was legal for an unmarried person to be provided contraception. It declared: “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.”

That decision—and its emphasis on the “right of privacy”—would be the basis the following year for the Roe v. Wade decision in which the Supreme Court ruled it was legal for a woman to have an abortion.

Other arrests of Baird included one in Huntington in 1971 at a presentation attended by 300 people, he related. He showed a birth control pill and a diaphragm, and on the basis of a mother being in the audience who was “holding a 14-month baby,” he was “handcuffed” by the Suffolk County Police Department, “spent the night in jail” and charged along with the infant’s mother with “endangering the welfare of a child.”

There would be other legal challenges including two more cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Further, Baird “every year for 30 years” went to an anti-abortion gathering called the “National Right to Life Convention”—he says the term “right to life” was devised as part of the anti-abortion PR strategy post-Roe v. Wade. At the conventions he conducted a “dangerous noontime picket” bearing a cross written on it “Free Women From The Cross of Oppression.” 

His clinics, in Hauppauge and Hempstead—the Hempstead clinic was struck by a man who barged into the waiting room wielding a firebomb in 1979—are now gone. But Baird, who will be 90 next month, keeps going. He urges people to translate their support for legal abortion in elections this and coming years making sure “they choose candidates who support a women’s rights to make their own decisions,” and to otherwise take action.

“Bill is tireless and amazing and still out there,” says Marilyn Fitterman of East Hampton, former president of the National Organization for Women–New York State, a grandmother of nine who has worked with Baird for decades and authored the recent book “Why I Marched” Moreover, she warned last week: “If the right for reproductive freedom falls, other things are also going to fall.” 

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.