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The woman responsible for ushering in 50 years of child slaughter in this country has passed into eternity. Church Militant’s Nadia Hazimeh puts the final nail in the Texas lawyer’s coffin.
Sarah Weddington, plaintiff’s attorney, Roe v. Wade: “Insofar as ‘liberty’ is meaningful, that liberty to these women would mean liberty from being forced to continue the unwanted pregnancy.”
Texas lawyer Sarah Weddington, best known for making abortion legal in the United States, is dead at 76. She died in her sleep on Sunday at her Austin home, where she had been experiencing a series of health issues.
Weddington represented Norma McCorvey, known as “Jane Roe,” before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 1973, she successfully persuaded the Court to overturn a Texas abortion ban. The result was that state prohibitions on abortion were deemed unconstitutional across the board. Weddington was 26 when she argued the case before the high court — the youngest lawyer in the court’s history to fill that role.
It was her legal partner, Linda Coffee, who discovered Roe, and who was responsible for most of the legal strategy in the case. But it was Weddington who got the limelight.
Even before Roe, Weddington was an abortion advocate. Weddington herself obtained an abortion in Mexico, when an unplanned pregnancy threatened her legal career.
Weddington: “I was in the courtroom. Just before the judges come in, there is a hush. And I had a flashback to that clinic in Mexico and to my feelings about it and then my determination (as time went by) that no woman should have to go through that.”
After Roe, Weddington went on to have a modest career in the Texas Legislature, later working in the Carter administration. Most of her life was spent in abortion activism.
Weddington’s abortion legacy may itself be overturned. The U.S. Supreme Court will be handing down its decision in an abortion-related Mississippi case in early summer.
Weddington was the daughter of a West Texas Methodist minister. Coffee, who was a Southern Baptist, later became involved in a lesbian relationship. A 2017 Vanity Fair article reports Coffee and her partner are still in Texas — “getting by on food stamps and social security.”
