"Coffee was afraid, however, that any ruling based on the Fourteenth would leave control of abortion in the physicians’ hands rather than in the hands of women, where she believed it belonged. If they got a ruling based on the Fourteenth Amendment, she feared there would be nothing to stop the Texas legislature from writing a new, crystal-clear law, possibly with the assistance of physicians, that still left the abortion decision in the hands of doctors-and under-mined the right of women to decide for themselves. Coffee, who wanted at least to make a stab as establishing a woman’s constitutional right to abortion, had no trouble persuading Weddington to share her view. Both women had come to believe that a woman had a right to control her own body, which included the decision to terminate a pregnancy, but they were less sure that the general populace or even a liberal court would share that conviction. So rather than risk everything, they opted to follow a more conservative course of action and include the Fourteenth Amendment with all its potential risks to women. They developed a strategy in which they would stress those amendment that addressed a woman’s right to abortion in their oral arguments but would also be prepared to fall back on the Fourteenth Amendment if necessary. In part, they chose this strategy because it would enable them to use two major decisions that were handed down as they were preparing their own cases. These involved abortion laws that had been declared unconstitutional on grounds of vagueness, but in each lawsuit the courts had also had something interesting to say about women’s rights to abortion."