Sarah Weddington, a young Texas lawyer who won the landmark Roe V. Wade case before the Supreme Court, led to legalization of abortion in the United States. She died at her Austin home on Sunday. She was 76.
Rebecca Seawright, an ex-assistant to Ms. Weddington, was a member the New York State Assembly. She said that she was in declining health, but that it was still unclear what caused her death.
Ms. Weddington was 26 years old and had never tried any legal case when she, along with Linda Coffee, her co-counsel in 1971, went before Supreme Court. 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.
Recent polls show that Americans are more familiarized than ever with Roe than 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.
Ms. Coffee and Ms. Weddington were both recent graduates of the University of Texas School of Law. Ms. Weddington had been friends with several Austin women in the late 1960s who were active in referring university students to doctors in the United States that would perform illegal abortions.
One time, Ms. Weddington asked the women if they could be accused of being 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. She was willing to conduct research on the matter.
Ms. Coffee was a Dallas-based lawyer and had more experience having worked for Sarah T. Hughes (a well-known federal judge). Ms. Coffee was at the time working with Norma McCorvey (a homeless pregnant woman) who was seeking an abortion. Ms. Coffee wrote Ms. Weddington in December 1969 asking if she would join forces to represent Ms. McCorvey against the Texas ban on abortions.
“Would you consider being co-counsel in the event that a suit is actually filed?” Ms. Coffee wrote. “I have always found that it is a great deal more fun to work with someone on a lawsuit of this nature.”
They met Ms. McCorvey in February 1970 at a Dallas pizza shop and persuaded Jane Roe to sign on as an anonymous plaintiff. Ms. Coffee drafted the legal brief against Henry Wade (the district attorney for Dallas County). Ms. Coffee and Mrs. Weddington argued the case at Federal District Court, and won.
The Supreme Court heard first appeals on Dec. 13, 1971. Ms. Weddington was the one who made 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. Optics were important. ‘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,” Mr. 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 decided that the case should again be heard before the full court. All justices were present when Ms. Weddington returned on October 11, 1972 and reargued this 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.
At the time, the decision was widely praised. The rise of religious right a few more years later made abortion a controversial political issue. It continues to be a divisive issue in American society. Ms. Weddington was subject to death threats and was often accompanied by security.
Sarah Catherine Ragle was conceived in Abilene (Texas) on February 5, 1945. Her father, the Rev. Herbert Doyle Ragle was a Methodist minister. Lena Catherine (Morrison) Ragle was her mother and taught business courses at the college.
Sarah was 16 when McMurry College, now McMurry University was established. This small Methodist school was located in Abilene. She majored English and graduated magnacum laude in 1964 at the age of 19. In 1967, she received her law degree at the University of Texas at Austin.
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. She was also well aware of the terrible 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 Mr. Weddington, a lawyer, started a law firm in Austin. They split in 1974. John Ragle, her brother, is her sole survivor.
Ms. Weddington ran for, and won, a Texas House seat while she waited for the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe V. Wade in 1972. 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, and also barred the questioning of a rape victim about her prior sex life.
A 1975 article in Texas Monthly said that Ms. Weddington might be “the hardest-working member of the House” and named her one of the 10 best legislators in the state. It said she had won the respect of old-school male legislators — but also that her feminist principles sometimes led her into hopeless battles.
She had served slightly longer than two terms before she was appointed general counsel of the Department of Agriculture in Washington in 1977.
From 1978 until 1981, she served as an assistant on women’s issues to President Jimmy Carter. Although Mr. Carter opposed federal funding of abortions, Ms. Weddington supported it, she stated publicly that she would not raise the issue.
The New York Times reported 1978 that some feminists believed that she had made a mistake. But she made it up to them when, a little more than a month after taking office, she masterminded the Senate’s approval of extending the deadline for states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.
After Mr. Carter’s defeat in the 1980 election, Ms. Weddington stayed in Washington and served as the first female director of the Texas Office of State-Federal Relations. In 1985, she returned to Texas and became a motivational speaker. She lectured at Texas Woman’s University, where she later became an adjunct professor in the department of history and government, and taught classes in gender-based discrimination and leadership at the University of Texas.
She continued to travel, including to Albany (N.Y.), when Gov. Andrew Cuomo has signed a 2019 measure to strengthen state protections against abortion rights, in the face increasing threats to Roev. Wade.
With the continual assaults against Roe, the law’s fate was in the forefront of her mind, and she saw her own legacy as inextricable from it.
“I am sure when my obituary is written, the lead paragraph will be about Roe v. Wade,” she wrote in Texas Monthly in 2003.
“I thought, over a period of time, that the right of a woman to make a decision about what she would do in a particular pregnancy would be accepted,” she added, “that by this time, the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the controversy over abortion would have gradually faded away like the closing scenes of a movie and we could go on to other issues.
“I was wrong.”
Source: NY Times