"Coffee and Weddington found surprisingly little to go on. Few suits had been brought involving abortion, and even fewer were important enough to set precedents. No abortion case had yet come before the Supreme Court, and only a few state courts had dealt with the issue. They found only one recorded case in Texas. Watson v. the State f Texas, decided in 1880, involved a young woman named Mattie Shook, who became pregnant by a man known only as Watson while living with him, his wife, and his children. Because he was a physician, Watson told Shook he could give her a medicine that would cause her to miscarry. Despite taking ergot, the drug he prescribed, even more frequently than he had ordered, she failed to miscarry. A note describing Mattie’s condition was sent to the doctor’s wife, reputedly from Mattie’s fiancé but actually from Mattie herself, and this led to the court case. Mattie Shook Testified against the physician. A lower court found the man guilty of “designedly” administering an abortifacient, an illegal act under the Texas antiabortion law, but a Texas appellate court reversed the lower court on technical grounds. The court’s reluctance to punish the abortionist twenty years after abortion had been outlawed in Texas was interesting and ever persuasive but the case was of little help to Weddington and Coffee, based as it was on a technicality rather than on any constitutional grounds."