Student group to host talk by reproductive rights pioneer

Guest speaker Bill Baird will give a lecture titled "Who Owns Your Body: Church? State? You! The Fight for Birth Control and Abortion" at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 20, in Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall, on the Skidmore College campus.Skidmore's Feminist Action Movement is the sponsor of the talk, which is free and open to the public.

Baird will discuss the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court case Eisenstadt v. Bairdthat established the right of unmarried people to possess contraception. The case was the result of Baird being charged with a felony for distributing contraceptive foams after lecturing at Boston University. Massachusetts law at that time mandated that doctors or pharmacists were the only people who could distribute contraception and then only to married people.The Supreme Court determined that the law Baird was accused of breaking violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution, the same right to privacy that served as the foundation for the 1973 case Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, and the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas, which is seen as a victory for gay rights.

In the five years it took to bring his case to the Supreme Court, Baird suffered greatly, including being sentenced to three months in prison in the later-condemned Charles Street Jail. There he chased rats from his cell, picked bugs and pebbles from his food, suffered an eye infection from lice and endured humiliating random strip searches by guards.

For 50 years Baird has worked on the front lines of the reproductive rights movement, earning the title "Father of the Abortion Rights Movement" by the Associated Press and UPI. He will discuss what he calls the "bologna method" that has sliced away at the gains achieved from Eisenstadt v. Baird and Roe v. Wade in the current social and political climate.

He will also talk about the presidential aspirants and their anti-abortion and birth control views and what he feels will be the future for abortion and birth control especially if a Republican is elected president. Upon completion of his speech he will engage students and others in a question and answer period.

A Brooklyn native, Baird graduated from Brooklyn College in 1955. He is the only non-lawyer with three U.S. Supreme Court victories.