He was coordinating research at a New York City hospital when he heard a woman scream. He raced into the corridor where a young African American woman was covered from the waist down in blood – an 8” wire coat hanger imbedded in her uterus. He caught her as she fell to the ground. This single mother had lamented the fate of her eight children at home before dying.

Outraged that she and others – mostly low-income women – were not able to access birth control and abortion help, he began investigating why. Hospitals, health departments and Planned Parenthood told him that it was illegal for unmarried people to access birth control. The National Organization for Women and NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) were as yet unformed.

Frustrated with the lack of concern for this silent epidemic of suffering that officials showed he began giving away packages of EMKO contraceptive foam and condoms to those in need. He converted an old United Parcel truck into what he labeled his “Plan Van” – a birth control and abortion classroom on wheels. He and volunteers went into disadvantaged sections of New York such as Harlem and Bedford Stuyvescent to bring this information directly to the public.

In 1964, he opened the first aboveground birth control and abortion referral clinic in Hempstead, Long Island, New York. Over the decades he operated three non-profit clinics in Massachusetts and New York.

However, such activities got him both arrested and fired from his job on May 13, 1965. In order to challenge Law 1142, he gave a lecture in Hempstead, New York to occupants of his “Plan Van.” On the same street the week before Martin Luther King had spoken about civil rights. This arrest resulted in the law being changed to allow birth control for unmarried people in that state.

In 1966, Bill Baird challenged New Jersey’s restrictive birth control statute resulting in his second arrest. It wasn’t until 1967 that his greatest challenge – the one that resulted in his landmark U.S. Supreme Court victory Baird v. Eisenstadt, was initiated.

About 800 Boston University students petitioned the young crusader to come to Massachusetts to challenge a law called “Crimes Against Chastity, Morality, Decency and Good Order.” On April 6, 1967, before a record crowd of 2,500 Boston University students and others, Bill Baird gave a speech about birth control, abortion and overpopulation. When he gave out one condom and one package of EMKO contraceptive foam to an unmarried minor female, he was immediately handcuffed and arrested and ultimately sentenced to three months in prison.

It took five years before he would be successful in Baird v. Eisenstadt. In between, in 1969, he challenged the Wisconsin anti-birth control law again getting himself arrested for merely lecturing on the topic.

After the U.S. Supreme Court initially refused to hear Baird v. Eisenstadt, Bill was forced to carry out his prison term. The Charles Street jail is now infamous as having been one of the worst in the nation. Bill was subjected to humiliating strip searches, picked bugs and pebbles out of his food (he lost nearly 20 pounds while there due to having pneumonia), chased rats out of his cell and survived a prison fire in which an inmate burned to death. Being housed with hardened criminals such as rapists and murderers put him under the constant threat of being beaten or raped.

“Crimes Against Chastity” carried with it a 5-year maximum sentence for each violation – a law that even Margaret Sanger and others did not dare challenge. However Bill dreamed that if he was successful, his case might be heard by the high court and access to birth control and even abortion would be legal for anyone who needed it.

In 1971, Police tried to frame him in Huntington, New York when they handcuffed Bill and the mother of a 14-month old child and threw both onto the ground. They claimed that he was “corrupting the morals of a minor” because the mother was in the audience with her daughter during his speech.

For years women came to Bill’s clinic by the thousands because they could not obtain the help they needed in their home states. On 12/11/68 the Washington Post reported, “It was 3a.m. in the morning before the last patient saw Baird…NOWHERE is such help available in the country.”

Then, Justice William O. Douglas said, “While the teachings of Bill Baird and Galileo may be of a different order, the suppression of either is equally repugnant.” He agreed with Bill that the case was in part about free speech.

Finally on March 22, 1972 Justice Brennan issued these words to all Americans, “If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision to bear or beget a child.”

Those words “bear or beget” became the bridge to the abortion case decided the following year in which Baird was quoted six times. It was also the foundation for Bill’s two other U.S. Supreme Court victories Baird v. Bellotti I (1976) and Baird v. Bellotti II (1979) which gave minors the right to an abortion without parental veto. The Court declared, “The Bill of Rights is not for adults only.” (More can be read on these important decisions in a 2006 May/June Humanist magazine article by Joni Baird.)

Baird v. Eisenstadt’s influence is only now being recognized. It was quoted five times in the 2003 gay rights victory Lawrence v. Texas. According to a Roger Williams University Law Review article by Roe v. Wade attorney Roy Lucas published in 2004, Baird has been “cited many hundreds of times.” He also disclosed that the case was mentioned in “over 52 subsequent Supreme Court cases from 1972 through December 2002” and that according to “Shepard’s citator, each and every one of the eleven U.S. Court of Appeals Circuits, as well as the Federal Circuit, has cited Baird v. Eisenstadt…”

Lucas wrote that the case has been “cited by the highest courts of all 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico” and said that “…in 1972 [Baird] supplanted its timid older cousin Griswold [the 1965 case for married people only].

Over the decades Bill Baird (who has been labeled by UPI and other media as the “Father of the Abortion Movement”) has never wavered in his commitment to the woman who died in his arms of a coat hanger abortion nor to those unknowns who may die in the future if abortion and even birth control are made crimes again.