When Arkansas teenager Jada Portillo learned that the theme of the 2019 National History Day competition was “Triumph and Tragedy,” she knew that she wanted her presentation to focus on the fight for reproductive freedom.
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As she dug in, Portillo discovered a name she had never heard before: Bill Baird. Eager to find out more about his efforts to provide birth control access to all who wanted it, she sent him an email asking if he would speak to her about his work. He immediately responded.
“Several times a year a college or high school student will send Bill an email asking for his help with a paper,” Joni Baird, Bill’s wife, told The Progressive. “Jada was different. She had already done some research and wanted to create a History Day monologue about Bill’s campaigns. We loved the idea and set up a time for her to interview him.”
Around this time, Bill and Joni were talking to filmmaker Rebecca Cammisa about the possibility of making a documentary about Bill’s decades-long career. As plans for the film became more concrete, Joni says that she and Bill suggested incorporating Jada into the narrative.
The result, Yours in Freedom, Bill Baird, is a moving and insightful feature that looks both forward and back to tell the story of a largely overlooked reproductive rights pioneer. Using interviews as well as archival footage, the film zeroes in on the risks Baird took to provide contraceptives to unmarried heterosexually-active people. It also provides an unflinching look at recent political backsliding that culminated in the Supreme Court’s June 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade, the decision that had legalized abortion forty-nine years earlier, and that opened the door to what Baird fears will be new limits on the availability of birth control and the overturning of marriage equality.
Much of Yours in Freedom centers on Baird’s early activism. As the Clinical Director at EMKO, a company that marketed and produced contraceptive foam in the early 1960s, Baird traveled between dozens of New York City-area hospitals to promote the product. “I saw so much desperation,” Baird told The Progressive. “At the time it was illegal for birth control to be sold or given to unmarried people. Although the decision in the legal case known as Griswold v. Connecticut gave married couples access to contraceptives in 1965, it was still considered immoral to provide it to people who were single.”
In response, Baird decided to do something bold; his initial gambit involved the creation of The Parents Aid Society. “I chose the name because it sounded so innocuous,” he says. At night, after his shift at EMKO ended, Baird drove what he called The Plan Van—a truck he purchased with his own money and the contributions of supporters—to different neighborhoods in the greater New York City area. From the back of the truck, he taught people about contraceptive efficacy and distributed birth control to those who wanted it, regardless of their marital status; he was never arrested.
Then, in 1967, Baird got a phone call from Boston University (BU) student Ray Mungo, who asked him to come to campus and deliver a lecture challenging the Massachusetts state law on Crimes Against Chastity, Morality, Decency, and Good Order. Mungo promised to arrange legal representation should Baird be arrested and described an orchestrated event that would involve the intentional distribution of condoms and EMKO foam to several unmarried undergraduates. Baird agreed, and arranged to visit to BU that March. He tells the filmmakers that on the night of the program, Hayden Hall was packed, with more than 2,000 people awaiting his lecture. As expected, he was arrested.
Joni Baird, CC BY-SA 3.0
Bill Baird pickets the National Right to Life Convention in June 2012.
Baird ultimately served ninety days of a possible ten-year sentence in Boston’s Charles Street Jail for his role in defying the state’s prohibition on birth control dissemination. He was freed after the First Circuit Court of Appeals reversed his conviction, but the case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In the Court’s 1972 Eisenstadt v. Baird decision—Eisenstadt was the Suffolk County, Massachusetts, sheriff—the court invalidated the Massachusetts statute.
Writing for the majority, Justice William Brennan concluded that, “If the right to privacy means anything, 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.”
This decision was foundational for later shifts in privacy protection, from the right to have consensual homosexual sex to the right to end an unwanted pregnancy.
Indeed, six decades after his arrest, the need for personal privacy continues to resonate.
It also continues to inspire. For Jada Portillo, Baird’s courageous stance was fortifying and led to an award-winning History Day presentation. Her deepening understanding of the importance of reproductive choice and agency is well integrated into the film, and while the bulk of the footage centers on Baird’s organizing and outspoken activism, Portillo’s relationship with him (and with Joni) stands out as an important bridge between past and present.
Interviews with anti-abortion leader Randall Terry, who often went head to head with Baird in the 1980s and 90s over the right to legal abortion, and with feminist activist Ti-Grace Atkinson, who resented Baird’s efforts to elicit gratitude from the burgeoning women’s movement, are included in the film. Both add a layer of criticism to a movie that is, for the most part, sympathetic to Baird.
Indeed, it’s hard to view Yours in Freedom and not see how much we owe him.
Arrested eight times in five states between 1965 and 1972, Baird acknowledges that his round-the-clock work schedule cost him his first marriage and strained his relationship with his four children. As the film progresses, his regret about this is obvious.
At the same time, his commitment to individual freedom remains as strong today as it was when he began working on reproductive justice in 1963. Now, ninety-one, he tells the filmmakers that his passion—for accessible and affordable abortion and birth control and the right to love whomever one chooses—has not ebbed.
“The government does not belong in our bedrooms,” he told The Progressive. “It’s a simple philosophy.”