"The Texas attorney general’s staff was beleaguered with civil rights suits in the late 1960s. At time they averaged fifty-two cases per lawyer. The numerous civil rights cases were considered a thorn in their side because they took up so much time and manpower for what were deemed inconsequential reasons. One prisoner, for example, had managed to file seventeen separate lawsuits involving possible violations of his civil rights. And if prisoners were a problem, students were even worse. Across the nation they had torn up campuses and towns, and even in staid Austin mobs of students from the University of Texas had swarmed over the Capitol grounds. Lawyers from the attorney general’s office had stood at the windows of their seventh-story office and watched what they could only view as out-and-out (and in their view, inexcusable) anarchy. By the time Roe v. Wade was filed, though, the attorney general’s men were optimistic that the pendulum of public opinion was swinging back to a law-and-order stance. People were tired of having their courts tied up with frivolous civil rights challenges from long-haired kids, draft protestors, and other dissidents. No one understood what women had to be so unhappy about. As the sixties drew to a relatively quiet lose the attorney general’s office had gotten its second wind; they would be more than happy to take on anyone who wanted to challenge the state’s abortion laws. They were sure the case would be an easy victory for them. The state could have decided not to respond to the challenge. It would have been a simple matter to let a law that was relatively unenforced anyway become officially defunct. When a woman had sued to establish her right to march with the Texas A & M band, the attorney general had declined to defend the law that kept her out of the band. But no one, at least no one in the attorney general’s office, thought legalizing abortion was as simple an issue as letting a woman march with the boys if that was what she wanted to do. Abortion involved life-and-death issues-specifically, the life of an innocent fetus that could not defend itself. No one was surprised when word came down from Attorney General Crawford Martin himself that the state would defend its abortion law."