Eisenstadt v. Baird

In addition to making contraceptives legally available to unmarried people throughout the United States, the decision described the constitutional right of privacy in language that foreshadowed the Court's 1973 finding that the right to privacy protected a woman's right to have an abortion.

Although the Supreme Court struck down state laws prohibiting the use of contraceptives by married couples in 1964's Griswold v. Connecticut, furnishing contraceptives to unmarried people in many states continued to be illegal. Massachusetts prohibited the distribution of contraceptives to anyone without a medical prescription and to unmarried people under any circumstances. Violation was punishable by up to five years imprisonment.

In the spring of 1967, birth control activist William R. Baird, Jr., accepted an invitation from Boston University students to lecture and "distribute free lists of abortionists and birth control devices to interested coeds." Prior to Baird's visit, the B.U. News published an article in which Baird, a former medical student who had once worked for a pharmaceutical company, explained that he had become a birth control and abortion rights activist after witnessing the death of a young mother of eight who had been admitted to an emergency room after an illegal abortion. Saying that more than ten thousand women had died from illegal abortions in 1966, he condemned laws making contraceptives available only to married women under a doctor's care and declared that he would "test this law in Massachusetts . . . No group, no law, no individual can dictate to a woman what goes on in her own body."

When Baird took the stage in an auditorium at Boston University on 6 April, there were 1,500 to 2,000 people in the audience--and three vice squad officers in the wings. B.U. News editor Raymond Mungo introduced Baird, saying, "We are here to test the legal aspects of the birth control and abortion laws in the state of Massachusetts."

When Baird announced his intention to distribute contraceptive foam and a list of places outside the United States where one might secure an abortion, he addressed the vice squad directly, reminding them to "do your duty." Telling the students that "the only way we can change the law is to get the case into a court of law," he urged them to approach and to take the offered information and contraceptive foam. He was arrested as soon as he started handing out the materials.