041493 Bill Baird,the Devil of Abortion

A Zealot for a Cause, turned Casualty-An advocate is anathema to allies and enemies alike.

By LINDSEY GRUSON Special to the New York Times

HEMPSTEAD , L.I. - Mention his name on the phone and Betty Friedan's gravelly voice turns into liquid vitriol. Then she hangs up.

Robin Morgan, the feminist author and editor, who is usu­ally attracted to publicity like an iron filing to a magnet, calls him a "chauvinist" and declines interviews if he's the subject.

In the peculiar jargon of condemnation, Roman 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 symbiotic hatreds and unite in a common cause, even if it's only their mutual antipathy to him?

The vilification of Mr. 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 tight over abortion. But Mr. 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 Mr. Baird, whose clinic here was one of the first in the country to openly offer abortion counseling. "But now, while I'm still alive, they won't take my hand or even let me stand by them."

In the eyes of impartial observers, but especially In his own view, Mr. 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," Mr. 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, even eagerly, 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 was tempered by doubt. Almost 50 years later, when a child suggested praying for Mr. 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 remembers. "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. Believe it or not, I wake up in the night and think, 'Could I be wrong and everyone else right? Could I be the Devil?' Then psychic perseverance kicks in and I realize it was just an aberration in cell growths. It may sound corny, but sometimes you feel like death is on your shoulder."

Mr. 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 Citv'~4oorest 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.

`Menace to the Nation'

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.

He was convicted and the judge, accusing him of being a "menace to the nation," sentenced him to three months in jail.

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," Justice Douglas later wrote in his book, "The Douglas Papers."

The Court's decision, handed down in 1972, extended access to contracep­tion to everyone. "If the right of privacy means anything," Justice Wil­liam J. Brennan Jr. wrote, "it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted government intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child."

It was more than just a triumph for Mr. Baird. Justice Brennan's phrase "bear or beget" was a precursor to decisions dealing directly with abor­tion. The following year, in Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that made abortion legal, the majority opinion cited the Baird precedent five times.

Shot at, Punched, Pummeled

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.

Mr. Baird says the ruling, which galvanized supporters of abortion rights, also led to what amounts 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 60-year-old crusader, who describes himself as "the sexually incorrect Joan of Arc," is clearly exhausted,

physically and financially spent. He says he lives on $350 a week and has no insurance. His back constantly hurts. He has trouble carrying his suitcase. "I don't know what I'm going to do when my body breaks down," he says.

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 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. The ceiling outside his office still sags.

Where he once rattled on about his plans, Mr. Baird now interrupts himself with reflections, like a man pondering his funeral pyre and his place in history. "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."

Pining for Respect

Above all, he seems to pine for respect, or at least acceptance from groups that advocate women's causes and reproductive rights. "I hope that Gloria Steinem would say, 'He's suffered enough, let's welcome our brother,' " he pleads. But like a rebellious teenager, he can't resist damning himself in the next phrase with an attack on the people whose support he so desperately craves.

"Gloria Steinem used birth control when she was with Mortimer Zuckerman, but she won't thank the guy who made it possible," he says.

There is also a verbal stiletto for Faye Wattleton, the former president of Planned Parenthood.

"It's obscene for anyone to be paid $200,000 a year and to be called a crusader," he says. "Look at what I've done with nothing. Imagine what I could have done with Planned Parenthood's budget. The women's groups think that righteousness is measured by money, by bloated bank accounts. But I measure it by commitment, by dedication, by success."

In her book, "Going Too Far," Ms. Morgan suggested Mr. Baird's mission was an effort to get women to sleep with him, and called him "one of the more male-supremacist men, around."

Ms. Steinem, like many of her colleagues, has refused to shake his hand. Ms. Friedan, who has suggested he is a Central Intelligence Agency, plant, stammered in a 20-second telephone interview that she wouldn't talk about him, called him "irrelevant," and, when questioned, hung up.

Mr. 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. "They became quite conservative, very religious," he says. "They talk to me about Jesus Christ and tell me he is my savior. I tell them I don't know any saviors. I've lost my children: they talk to me, but they don't want to hear about their father and his wars."

"My life is sad," he says. "I wish I could tell you it's happy."

The story of his life, he says, is that of Don Quixote, with one difference - in his version, Mr. Baird wins. Nonetheless, he says he wants "The Quest" ("The Impossible Dream") played at his funeral.