112893 Last Hurrah for Bill Baird pioneer in abort war

By HELEN PETERSON Daily News Staff Writer

Bill Baird glanced at the bars on the window of his Hauppauge, L.L, abortion center and apologized for the chill in his Front office.

"This is the coldest room in the clinic," he said. It's an unusual admission for a man who, after devoting his life to legalized abortion and birth control, rarely says he's sorry for anything.

His mission began in 1963, while he was working for a spermicide company. He was at Harlem Hospital when he heard a woman screaming and rushed to her side.

She was covered with blood from the waist down, with an 8-inch piece of coat hanger sticking out of her uterus," he said. It was before abortion was legal, a

time when desperate women used wire hangers to scrape their uterine wall and induce bleeding.

"She made a mistake by half an inch," he said. "She died."

Bill Baird 

staring at the future

Thirty years and three Supreme Court victories later, Baird, 61, is wondering what he's going to do with the rest of his life. And he's bitter.

During the 1960s, women from around the country went to his Hempstead, L.L, clinic. The clinic was firebombed in 1979 and later reopened, but closed in August when he ran out of money.

His Hauppauge clinic may close within weeks if he doesn't raise $100,000. He needs the money for rent and other bills. A third clinic, in Boston, closed in 1990.

"If I were one of the Operation Rescue people, all the pro-lifers would rally around me. What I grieve most about is that the feminists, on a national level, have turned their backs on me," Baird said. "I thought everybody would help me. What the hell is 1 000?

Lecture requests drop

These days Baird lives on a $288-a-week salary from the Hauppauge clinic. The bulk of his income had come from the lecture circuit, but his engagements have dwindled. He blames those who he says ', should be his natural allies - feminists.

"There are women who hate me, not because of what I do, but because I'm sexually incorrect," Baird said.

Lecture agent Randy Ehmer has represented Baird since 1988, when he spoke on 20 to 30 college campuses a year. This year he had one appearance.

"They say, `We don't want a man speaking on women's issues,' " Ehmer said. "Too many students don't recognize Bill's place in history."

Diane Welsh, president of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women, said she was startled that Baird's clinics were closing and saddened by his bitterness.

"He does have a place in history and in our hearts," she said.

Baird's most historic victory grew out of a 1967 incident in which he handed a condom and a can of spermicide to a Boston University student. It was a calculated challenge to Massachusetts' chastity law, which made it illegal for anyone but married couples to get birth control devices.

The case led to the 1972 Supreme Court decision, Baird vs. Eisenstadt, giving single people the right to obtain contraceptives.

Baird's zealotry eventually resulted in death threats, forcing him to move his wife and five children to rural New England.

Would he do it again? Baird puts it this way: "If I said abortion is now illegal because people like Bill Baird quit, and women had to resort to coat hangers and knitting needles, then everything I have done is worth it."