"At this point, Weddington had never tried a contested case in court, and the preparatory work alone was a daunting enough prospect for a young lawyer. Impressed by both Linda Coffee’s work as a law student and her subsequent experience with federal cases while she was clerking for Judge Sarah Hughes, Weddington knew that Coffee would be an ideal partner in this endeavor. Buoyed by the excitement of aiding McCluskey in the partially-successful Buchanan, Coffee was eager to lend her expertise. As the two women strategized, they faced a troubling dilemma: they did not have a plaintiff. In order to ensure the continued secrecy of the abortion referral service, Coffee cautioned against using the service’s volunteers as plaintiffs. Thankfully, the two found a married couple, Marsha and David King, who were eager to sign on as plaintiffs early in the process. Marsha, a Dallas-area feminist with a PhD in English approached the lawyers after hearing Coffee give a lecture on the intended lawsuit. Due to a neurological condition, she could not safely carry a pregnancy to term, nor could she use hormonal birth control pills. As the Supreme Court had recently ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that married couples had a constitutional right to privacy, the Kings presented one viable angle through which to challenge Texas’s abortion law. Nevertheless, the lawyers knew that in order to most effectively counter the constitutionality of the statute, they would need a pregnant woman who was willing to take on the task of being a plaintiff. While the Austin abortion referral service offered a number of promising leads, none of these women elected to join the lawsuit as they had the financial means through which to acquire a safe, but illegal, abortion. Meanwhile in Dallas, Norma McCorvey was not so lucky. For her, the meeting at Colombo’s was not one step in a long process of legal strategizing, it was a desperate attempt to finally obtain a procedure that would free her from the physical and emotional turmoil of giving birth to a third child that she could not raise herself. Because of this major discrepancy, it is here that, in their respective memoirs, A Questions of Choice (1992) and I am Roe (1994) Weddington and McCorvey’s stories begin to diverge. Notably, both texts were published in the early-1990s, over two decades after the initial federal district court Roe trial. Nevertheless, the two women’s ideological approaches to their involvement in the case are as blatant as the chasm between the worlds they inhabited."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
pp.17-18
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Roe v. Wade
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the
1424 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Roe v. Wade →
Related Quotes
"Harry Blackmun questioned Weddington again on the issue of fetal personhood, as did Potter Stewart. They wanted her t…"
"In 1938, seven Justices heard a constitutional challenge to a federal ban on shipping adulterated milk in interstate …"
"The Court has simultaneously transformed judicially created rights like the right to abortion into preferred constitu…"
"Beyond these paltry authorities, the Court adds only the argument that we should not “encourage a kitchen-sink approa…"
"JUSTICE BREYER, with whom JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR and JUSTICE KAGAN join, dissenting. The procedural posture of this case l…"
"JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, with whom JUSTICE BREYER and JUSTICE KAGAN join, dissenting. The Court’s order is stunning. Presen…"
"By the time that Michael Taylor sent out his communiqué, pro-life lawyers had been preparing legal arguments in Roe a…"
"Lawyers for the states of both Georgia and Texas argued that abortion restrictions were appropriate because the state…"
"Pro-life lawyers had complained before about the poor quality of state attorney’s attempts to defend restrictive abor…"
"Ellen McCormack’s Long Island-based organization, Women for the Unborn, which now had 2,000 members, submitted a brie…"