"ON A HOTNIGHT in August 1969, Norma McCorvey, a twenty-one-year-old carnival worker nicknamed Pixie, was returning to her motel on a side road outside Augusta, Georgia. On her way back to her room, she was gang-raped by three men and a woman. The carnival and Pixie moved on to Texas. There, several weeks later, Pixie found herself pregnant. A high school dropout, who was divorced and had a five-year-old daughter and little money, Norma McCorvey unsuccessfully sought an abortion. Texas, like most other states at the time, prohibited abortions unless necessary to save a woman’s life. “No legitimate doctor in Texas would touch me,” she has remembered. “I found one doctor who offered to abort me for $500. Only he didn’t have a license, and I was scared to turn my body over to him. So there I was-pregnant, unmarried, unemployed, alone and stuck.” A lawyer friend, Henry McCloskey, Jr., agreed to find someone to adopt the baby. He also introduced her to two recent graduates of the University of Texas Law School, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee."