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:
“It is always the moralists who do the most harm. Abortion is the logical outcome of civilization, only the jungle gives birth and moulders away as nature decrees. Man plans.”
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)
“The freedom to share one’s insights and judgments verbally or in writing is, just like the freedom to think, a holy and inalienable right of humanity that, as a universal human right, is above all the rights of princes.”
—Carl Friedrich Bahrdt (1740–1792)
“New pioneer of days and ways, be gone.
Hunt out your own or make your own alone.
Go down the street.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)