"Weddington and Coffee’s motivation in taking on the Texas abortion laws was, I discovered somewhat to my surprise, primarily ideological. On one of my visits to Texas, I asked the two women why they had decided to work on abortion reform, as opposed to any number of other women’s issues. Neither woman had undergone an abortion nor had any firsthand experience with one. Like so many other women their age, they had known or heard of women who had undergone illegal abortions, but abortion had not touched either woman in a close, personal way. But like many women, although their interest was impersonal and somewhat abstract, they were angry. As they told Norma, they wanted to help women, and since they had legal skills-something few women could claim at that time-they thought they could use them to do something about the present restrictive laws. Each woman told me separately, in remarkably similar words, how attuned she was to the rapid changes occurring in women’s lives. The idea of abortion liberalization was in the air from the mid-1960s on, and the two women thought they could do something, at least about the Texas law."