San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Lawyer successfully argued Roe vs. Wade
Sarah Weddington, the young Texas lawyer whose successful arguments before the Supreme Court in the landmark Roe vs. Wade case led to the legalization of abortion throughout the United States, died Sunday at her home in Austin, Texas. She was 76.
Rebecca Seawright, a former assistant to Weddington and a member of the New York state Assembly, said that she had been in declining health but that the cause of her death had yet to be determined. Weddington was 26 and had never tried a legal case when she and Linda Coffee, her co-counsel, went before the Supreme Court in 1971. Their legal battle culminated on Jan. 22, 1973, when the court ruled in one of the most consequential decisions in American history that a Texas state law banning abortions except to save the woman’s life was unconstitutional.
Polls show that Americans are more familiar with Roe than with almost any other Supreme Court decision. That shouldn’t be surprising; it has been at the center of political debate for decades and now faces its most serious challenge, with the court seemingly poised to uphold a Mississippi law that could essentially roll back Roe.
Weddington and Coffee were recent graduates of the University of Texas School of Law in Austin. In the late 1960s, Weddington was friends with several women in Austin who were actively referring university students and others to doctors in the United States who would perform abortions illegally, and to other countries where abortions were legal.
At one point, the women asked Weddington if they could be prosecuted as accomplices. She said she didn’t know — until that point, the only legal cases she had handled were uncontested divorces, wills for people with no money and an adoption for her uncle. But she was willing to research the matter for free.
She phoned Coffee, who was practicing law in Dallas and had more experience, having clerked for Sarah T. Hughes, a well
known federal district judge. At the time, Coffee was working with a homeless pregnant woman named Norma McCorvey, who was seeking an abortion. In December 1969, Coffee sent Weddington a letter asking if she wanted to join forces and represent McCorvey in a challenge to the Texas law banning abortions.
“Would you consider being co-counsel in the event that a suit is actually filed?” Coffee wrote. “I have always found that it is a great deal more fun to work with someone on a lawsuit of this nature.”
In February 1970, the two met with McCorvey at a pizza shop in Dallas and persuaded her to sign on as an anonymous plaintiff, Jane Roe. Coffee prepared the legal brief, which became a classaction suit, against Henry Wade, the district attorney for Dallas County. Both Coffee and Weddington argued the case in U.S. District Court and won.
The Supreme Court first heard appeals on Dec. 13, 1971, with Weddington making the oral arguments.
“Weddington enjoyed the public stage as much as Coffee disliked it,” Joshua Prager, a journalist, wrote in Vanity Fair in 2017. “Moreover, despite her brilliance, Coffee could come across as bedraggled. And optics mattered. ‘She was younger than I was,’ Coffee said of Weddington. ‘She was blond, blue-eyed.’”
Jay Floyd, who was representing Texas, opened his argument with what commentators have called the “worst joke in legal history.” “It’s an old joke,” Floyd told the court, “but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they are going to have the last word.”
As it happened, only seven of the nine justices heard the arguments that day — two others had retired and had not yet been replaced. The justices then decided that the case should be reargued before the full court. All justices were sitting when Weddington came back on Oct. 11, 1972, and reargued the case.
Their 7-2 decision held that Texas had violated Roe’s constitutional right to privacy as outlined in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Fourteenth amendments.
The decision was widely praised at the time. But with the rise of the religious right a few years later, abortion became a volcanic political issue, and it remains one of the most divisive
in American society. Weddington received death threats and often traveled with security.
Sarah Catherine Ragle was born on Feb. 5, 1945, in Abilene, Texas. Her father, the Rev. Herbert Doyle Ragle, was a Methodist minister. Her mother, Lena Catherine (Morrison) Ragle, taught college business courses.
Sarah was 16 when she enrolled at McMurry College, now McMurry University, a small Methodist school in Abilene. She majored in English and graduated magna cum laude at age 19 in 1964. She earned her law degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1967.
During her last year of law school, she had an abortion, which she disclosed in her 1992 book, “A Question of Choice.” She and her boyfriend, Ron Weddington, who would become her husband in 1968, drove to Mexico, where she said she had a safe abortion. But she was well aware of the grim experiences of other women.
“Some had beaten their own abdomens or jumped down stairs to try to induce an abortion,” she wrote in Texas Monthly in 2003. “Others had eaten mixtures of chemicals and cleaning products.”
She and Ron Weddington, who was also a lawyer, set up a law practice in Austin. They divorced in 1974. Her brother, John Ragle, is her sole immediate survivor.
In 1972, Weddington ran for and won a seat in the Texas House. With Ann Richards, the future governor of Texas, as one of her legislative aides, she pushed through several bills regarding women’s rights, including one that increased the statute of limitations on reporting rape from two to three years.