"The feminists had won legal abortion in New York. But the change in the law allowed the judges in Abramowicz to declare the case moot and throw it out. Without the New York case working its way through the courts, Stearns scrambled to start over. During the next two years, alongside other lawyers, she sued on behalf of women to strike down the abortion laws of New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island and helped others bring similar cases in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. She kept pressing her claim that women had a right to abortion based on equal protection. She also sued based on a constitutional right to privacy, which the Supreme Court recognized in 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, to protect the use of contraception by married couples. But as Stearns worked on the East Coast, two lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, who didn’t have strong ties to the feminist movement, pursued a challenge to Texas’ near ban of abortion that they filed in March 1970. Their case ended up being first on the Supreme Court’s docket, after Abramowicz was dismissed — and would wind up making history. It was called Roe v. Wade. As Weddington wrote in her memoir decades later: “We never thought we were filing what would become the Supreme Court case.” A New York assemblyman casting an unexpected vote, a court throwing out Abramowicz, the time it took for judges to rule in Stearns’s other cases — they are links in the long chain of reasons the country has arrived at a precarious moment for abortion rights."