"It was still January when Norma McCorvey and McCluskey met Coffee downtown in her office at Palmer, Palmer & Burke, where, for $450 a month, Coffee waded through petitions for bankruptcy. Coffee was intense, incapable of small talk, pale and unkempt besides. All at once, Norma was ill at ease beside her. She looked, said Norma, “like she got out of bed and forgot to comb her hair.” Looking back at Norma, Coffee saw a small woman with a big belly. Says Coffee: “She looked really pregnant.” Exactly how far along Norma was could not be known. In 1970, gestational age could only be estimated, and estimates could be off by up to four weeks. “We weren’t using ultrasound at that time,” explains Frank Bradley, the Dallas obstetrician who delivered Norma’s second child. Instead, he says, doctors used pelvic exams and menstrual history to “try to figure it out best they could.” It was more than likely that Norma had reached at least her twentieth week. And she had thus reached the legal limit at which any doctor in the United States—even where abortion was legal—could perform an elective abortion. In January 1970, abortion was legal only in Oregon, where residents were permitted to abort through the first 150 days, and in California, where nonresidents, too, could abort through 20 weeks. Abortion was also not illegal in the District of Columbia. (A federal district court had recently declared the anti-abortion law in D.C. -unconstitutional, and the appellee in that case performed abortions until at least the 20th week.) Coffee thus knew that it was almost certainly too late for Norma to get an abortion. “It was my opinion,” the lawyer soon recalled, “that, very likely, the suit would not solve her immediate problem.” It was not too late, however, for Norma to file suit. Indeed, it would be of no legal consequence if the suit Norma filed came to term after she did. “There were fairly established principles that that doesn’t moot the case,” says Coffee. (Among them was the category of cases deemed “capable of repetition yet evading review”—which meant, in essence, that the issue was a recurring one, but in each instance would pass before the courts had time to fully address it.) Coffee told Norma what she knew. “I remember saying,” she recalls, “that I thought she was probably too far along to have an abortion under the protection of the federal court.” But Norma had nowhere else to turn. Coffee was her last hope. Coffee told Norma that if she filed suit, she might have to testify. Norma agreed—never mind, says Coffee, that she “likely had no idea what that would entail.” Coffee sensed that Norma had little idea what filing suit even meant. “I could tell she didn’t have a lot of education,” says Coffee. “Maybe she was being a little too cooperative. … Most people would ask more questions if they were thinking about filing a lawsuit over something of that magnitude.” Norma only asked if filing suit would cost her money. It would not; Coffee would do the case pro bono. Norma agreed to file and left."