"Days later, Norma was all belly and blue jeans when she met the two lawyers for pizza in a restaurant popular with SMU students. Seeing Coffee again made Norma anxious. But Norma was taken with Weddington, strawberry-blonde and curvy and just two years older than she. “She was wholesome and robust and had things happening!” said Norma. “I fell in love with Sarah. She had all this hair.” Over a tablecloth of red and white gingham, talk turned to the inalienable rights of women. The lawyers asked, recalled Norma, if it was not a good thing that women could smoke in public, could vote. Norma agreed that it was, and then that women ought to have the right to an abortion, too. Still, it was not conviction that had led Norma to Columbo’s Pizza Parlor this winter afternoon; it was happenstance, the fact that her doctor happened to know McCluskey who happened to know Coffee. And Norma again made clear that she did not want to further a cause; she wanted an abortion. Weddington repeated what Coffee had said, about her probably being too far along. “I’m not saying I misunderstood,” said Norma. “But I thought we were all real clear on what I really wanted.” Had Coffee and Weddington really wanted to help their potential client get an abortion, they might have at least tried. As Victoria Foe, a biology student who worked with Weddington on the referral network in Austin, recalled: “In desperate situations, women up to 20 weeks were not turned away.” And the lawyers might have taken Norma to a doctor for an X-ray so as to better gauge how far along she actually was. If there was time to end her pregnancy, they might have asked a judge to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent state officials from enforcing the law against their client. Or they might have sent Norma to a clinic in their network—be it in Piedras Negras, just over the Mexican border (where both Weddington and Foe had had abortions), or in California, where every Friday a group of Texas women flew. “American [Airlines] was the plane,” Weddington recalled decades later. “About 10 women every Friday went to California and then they were back late on Sunday.” But the lawyers did none of those things. It didn’t matter that only months before, Weddington had helped to write the American Bar Association’s code of ethical standards, which instructed that every lawyer must work “solely for the benefit of his client.” Weddington and Coffee had interests of their own. They wished to file a lawsuit. And, as the law professor Kevin McMunigal later noted, they now set aside Norma’s desire for an abortion “in favor of the collective interests of the abortion rights cause.”"
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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
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