Abortion Rights Pioneer
Reporter Georgie Anne Geyer called Baird "father of abortion rights", a label that has oft been repeated for decades in the media. Baird established the nation's first abortion referral center in 1963 in Hempstead, New York.
In 1967 Baird facilitated the first abortion slush fund on a college campus.
A Washington Post article on Baird's clinic, with a waiting room packed with women from across the nation, reported, "It was 3.a.m. before the last patient saw Baird . . . Nowhere is such help available in the U.S." Baird risked a 10-year jail term for each of the thousands of women he helped to get abortions. Others provided abortion information anonymously through the mail; however, Baird was thoroughly out in the open doing so.
Baird continued fighting for reproductive freedom and directed three non-profit clinics that are now closed due to constant extremist opposition. In 1979, his Hempstead clinic was firebombed by anti-abortion terrorist Peter Burkin. All escaped due to Baird's training drills with his employees that prepared them for such a violent attack. Burkin was given a very light sentence, two years in a mental hospital. With his clinic under constant threat, Baird wrote and distributed the nation's first clinic self-defense manual to combat terrorism.
Read more about this topic: Bill Baird (activist)
Famous quotes containing the words abortion, rights and/or pioneer:
“If the vice president thinks it’s disgraceful for an unmarried woman to bear a child, and if he believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he’d better make sure that abortion remains safe and legal.”
—Diane British (b. 1948)
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“The poet is no tender slip of fairy stock, who requires peculiar institutions and edicts for his defense, but the toughest son of earth and of Heaven, and by his greater strength and endurance his fainting companions will recognize the God in him. It is the worshipers of beauty, after all, who have done the real pioneer work of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)