How Boston University helped end ‘crimes against chastity’
Bill Baird and Boston University changed history for women in the 60’s.
Sue Katz knew what she was doing in 1967, when she walked up in front of the crowd in a Boston University auditorium and took a condom from Bill Baird.
She was breaking the Massachusetts “Crimes Against Chastity’’ law. In 1967, it was illegal for single men and women to have access to birth control.
Katz has always been political—she had started a civil rights group as a 15-year-old in Pittsburgh—so she had no qualms about participating in the lecture by Baird, an abortion and birth-control activist.
But only Baird was arrested that day.
He spent the next three months in Charles Street Jail, before taking his case to the Supreme Court and changing the world as Massachusetts residents, and America, knew it.
Baird’s case didn’t go in front of the Supreme Court until 1972, after his stint in jail. He said it was so abusive, he’s still scarred to this day at 83 years old. His case was Eisenstadt v. Baird—Eisenstadt being Thomas S. Eisenstadt, then the Sheriff of Suffolk County.
Gerald Goldman, an attorney who clerked for Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, who wrote the majority opinion for Eisenstadt v. Baird, said that the case impacted many others.
“Most importantly, it extended the constitutional right of privacy upheld in [Griswold v. Connecticut] for married individuals to unmarried ones, with implications for the ‘abortion’ cases then pending,’’ Goldman wrote in an email. “Subsequent Supreme Court and lower court cases have relied on the decision, including Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges, the recently handed down decision by the Court on same sex marriage.’’
Baird has been involved with birth control his entire adult life, but it was in 1963, when he was the clinical director for the birth control company EMKO, that he witnessed a woman die after giving herself a coat-hanger abortion. He said he heard a blood-curdling scream that he will never, to this day, forget.
“Knowing that I’m facing 10 years in jail, knowing I could be stabbed to death in prison, knowing I could be raped,’’ Baird said of the risks he took when fighting for reproductive rights. “I will still give up my freedom if I could be heard by the Supreme Court, not just for birth control, but for abortion and gay rights.’’
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When Katz arrived on BU’s campus in 1965, the reproductive rights movement was gaining momentum. Her freshman year coincided with the Supreme Court ruling on Griswold v. Connecticut, which challenged a Connecticut law from 1879 that penalized anyone who used “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purposes of preventing conception,’’according to a PBS series on the Supreme Court. The court ruled that the law could not be enforced—for married people.
That same year, Baird was imprisoned for teaching about birth control in New York.
“I think any human being who is sexually active has the right to medical care regardless of age and marital status,’’ Baird told Boston.com. “May 14, 1965 I was put in prison in New York for teaching this. I had a mobile clinic, because I believed in going to the poor people, and went from street to street in Harlem and I taught about birth control and gave them free birth control.’’
A brief history of birth control in the United States
A brief history of birth control in the U.S.
This short timeline gives a glimpse into the history of contraception in the United States.
In 1966, Baird was arrested again, for publicly displaying contraceptive devices in New Jersey. He traveled there to challenge a restrictive statute after the commissioner of welfare threatened to jail unwed mothers under the law of fornication, according to Newsday.
“That’s when Massachusetts called me, with a petition of signatures, asking ‘Would you fight the ‘Crimes against Chastity’ law?’’’ Baird said.
The editor of the BU News initially invited Baird to campus, and that invitation was quickly followed by a petition of about 700 student signatures.
The law—sec. 272 in Massachusetts, labeled as “Crimes against Chastity’’—criminalized unmarried people from receiving any information about birth control, even from a registered physician.
“I don’t remember who approached me, but one of his people said ‘Bill Baird wants to challenge this in the courts, and we need a couple people who are willing to risk [arrest],’’ Katz said. “This was a political action—not surprising or spontaneous—to take this issue and force a court decision about it.’’
The 1967 BU News article after Bill Baird’s arraignment.BU News
Boston University was an extremely political campus in the early 1960s, but the feminism movement hadn’t yet exploded. At BU, female students had a 10 p.m. curfew, while the male students didn’t, Katz said. Women couldn’t wear pants without the fear of getting expelled—even in their dorm rooms.
Baird came up to Boston in his 25-foot van to speak to BU students. He saw a dozen police cars staked out on the campus, he said, and thought there was an anti-war rally going on.
They were waiting for him.
“I walked in and I couldn’t believe that there was this roar from people,’’ Baird said. “You couldn’t even walk in—people lined the aisles, and police, many in plain clothes.’’
The BU News put the crowd at 2,000. Baird said that he spoke about women’s rights and the population. The Massachusetts law specified that you couldn’t “print, publish, or exhibit [contraception] in any means,’’ so he held up a Time Magazine from that week that featured a montage of birth control pills. He held up a condom and a pamphlet on the rhythm method.
“The Catholic Church says that the rhythm method is 96 percent effective, but don’t believe it,’’ Baird was quoted as saying in the BU News. “Our best statistics indicate that it is about 40 percent effective.’’ He also called out a specific cardinal.
“That made them really angry,’’ Baird told Boston.com. “Because you don’t attack a cardinal in Boston.’’
Katz was waiting in the audience, with a handful of others who had previously agreed to take birth control from Baird. She remembers sitting on the far right of the hall while a friend sat over to the left. Baird asked if any student wished to receive contraceptives, and Katz walked up to the stage.
“It was pre-planned with two or three of us to go, and then when we came up, everybody else came up,’’ she said. “After those of us who were designated, it started a ‘oh yeah I could use some of that’ feeling in the crowd and other women came up. That’s a movement.’’
Some Massachusetts women who played a role in the women’s movement
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Baird was arrested and charged with violating all three sections of the “Crimes against Chastity’’ law, according to the BU News.
“History is being made today in Massachusetts,’’ he said as he was being led off the stage.
Baird was promised support to fight the case, he said, but he said Planned Parenthood and the ACLU abandoned him.
“The ACLU copped out on me,’’ Baird told The Harvard Crimson in 1967. “James Hamilton, of their staff, assured me that they would provide for my defense, then he told me the executive committee had reservations.’’
Since Hamilton passed away in 2014, and since the case took place so long ago, the ACLU said it could not find enough information to comment.
There’s no question Baird was a controversial figure, even years after he helped bring birth-control to Massachusetts.
A 1993 New York Times article referred to him as “The Devil of Abortion,’’ but later published an editor’s note saying “That headline, combined with the omission of material about those who support Mr. Baird, gave unfair weight to the views of his critics.’’
That article opened with the lines, “Mention his name on the phone and Betty Friedan’s gravelly voice turns into liquid vitriol. Then she hangs up.’’
In the same article, the Times said feminist author and editor Robin Morgan suggested in print that his efforts were just an attempt to get women to sleep with him.
“My god, there’s got to be an easier way than being shot at twice, jailed eight times, and living hand to mouth,’’ Baird said .
The Times also noted that Planned Parenthood called him an “embarrassment’’ in the ‘60s. Baird believes it was because he was more progressive than the group at the time.
“I fight for women and I’m not a woman—I’m a human, and we’re in a family called humanity,’’ Baird said. “I just ask people to accept me as your coworker and co-fighter, and I’m affective. 52 years of strategy, and fighting, I live, breath, and sleep it—but I get clobbered by my allies.’’
Katz agreed that Baird’s story isn’t that well known—though she said she doesn’t necessarily side with Friedan, since the feminist icon also called the lesbian community “the lavender menace.’’
“There’s a lot of early feminist history that you don’t know about because the only stuff we know about, more or less, is the stuff that academics write,’’ Katz said. “And that’s a certain class of people, and a certain relationship to activism.’’
When initially contacted for comment, Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts officials said they had no records concerning Baird. Tricia Wajda, director of public affairs for the Planned Parenthood Advocacy Fund of Massachusetts, later wrote in an email: “Expanded access to birth control has dramatically improved women’s lives as demonstrated by their increased college enrollment rates and notable wage gains since the 1960s. Bill Baird played an instrumental role in increasing such access in Massachusetts.’’
Baird leaving the courthouse after his 1967 arraignment.BU News
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