The forces that drew Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee together to challenge the Texas abortion laws were not entirely the result of fate. These two young lawyers who came of age during the tumultuous sixties, eager to try out their law degrees and test their ideologies, could just as easily have thrown their energies into the civil rights movement. That was the area for someone with a finely honed social conscience, and it did not hurt that, with a little good luck and timing, careers could hastily be made.
The newly emerging women’s rights movement, by contrast, was not a proven career maker, nor did it have the cachet of working in civil rights. Women’s rights, however, were accessible to women, which is more than one could say for most other areas of the law. At least in part, Weddington’s and Coffee’s involvement in women’s issues and ultimately with abortion came about because of the doors that were still closed to them in other areas.
Their interest in women’s rights paralleled that of hundreds of thousands of other young, mostly college-educated women during the 1960s. Feminism was emerging as an important social issue for the second time in a hundred years.
The first organized attempt at achieving women’s equality took shape after the Civil War, when a group of mostly elite, middle- and upper-class women who had worked in the abolitionist movement and had seen parallels between the plights of women and blacks began to press for greater equality for women. The women’s suffrage movement eventually focused on, and in 1920 succeeded in winning, the right to vote. However, the suffragists had tied their cause to their roles as mothers. They argued that women would be better mothers, worthy of greater respect, if they could vote. It was essentially a conservative doctrine.
After the suffragists’ victory, feminism entered a dormant era, undoubtedly because women believed that in winning the vote, they had gained more than they actually had. For obvious reasons, women’s reproductive rights had not become an issue during the first wave of feminism, nor would it become one until the early part of the twentieth century, at which point Americans became involved in an extended public debate over birth control.
The debate arose in the first decade of the new century among Socialists and anarchists and was promoted by political radicals such as Emma Goldman and Moses Harmon. Socialists were not, however, particularly concerned with women’s rights, preferring to focus debate on whether the working class would fare better or worse by limiting its size. Despite its radical origins, this debate touched a nerve throughout society, and the birth control movement (not yet named that) was spawned.
When Margaret Sanger rose from the radical ranks to ride the crest of the new movement and to convert birth control, an expression she coined, into a less radical, single-issue cause, she found herself at odds with the suffragists, who were politically conservative and feared that contraception, by any name, would destroy family life. Although much was accomplished in the birth control movement, for the second time a cause involving women’s lives had failed to engender any real discussion of women’s right to control their reproduction.
Even after Simone de Beauvoir wrote prophetically in 1945 that without the right to choose when they would bear children, women could never consider themselves truly free, another generation would have to come of age before women would begin to understand her message. Not until 1963, when the first magazine excerpts of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique rocked the female consciousness, did women begin to examine the relationship between reproduction and equality.
The impact of Friedan’s book on women’s lives was astounding. In response to requests from women for help, Betty Friedan founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), and in a stroke of genius for the budding organization and the movement, NOW began to encourage women to form something called consciousness-raising groups, intimate support groups in which women could meet and discuss their mutual concerns. The groups were not only attractive to the converted, they were also an excellent way of recruiting women to their own movement.
Throughout the late 1960s, following an agenda established by NOW, women began meeting in small, informal groups all over the country to discuss such topics as marriage, careers, motherhood, and sexuality. Women who participated in those groups recall that discussions about sexuality inevitably worked their way around to abortion, something rarely discussed publicly before. Until the late sixties, a woman who underwent an abortion often told no one—not her best friend, not her sister, and sometimes not even her husband—about her choice. Once an abortion was over, most women tried to put it behind them, tried never to think about it again.
Abortion was a painful, lonely, and, with its imposed secrecy, sometimes guilt-producing event in a woman’s life. Now, perhaps for the first time, women began to share the pain they felt over the decision to abort—as well as the problems of being unable to control one’s fertility as well as one might like. They shared their common experiences with abortion—the desperate attempts to raise money; the trip, often alone, to a nearby city; the often humiliating experience at the hands of an illegal abortionist. They talked about the abortions that went smoothly: their surprise at discovering that abortion was really minor surgery; their shock and relief at learning that their family doctor would help them, perhaps even perform the surgery himself; their surprise in finding out that an illegal abortionist ran what amounted to a storefront clinic and employed the most up-to-date surgical techniques. And they spoke, in hushed tones, about the bad parts: the fears that they might be maimed or injured and left to die in a strange place; the unsanitary conditions and the risk of infection; the degradation of undergoing an illegal operation; the condescension and insults; even the occasional rape.
For the moment, it was enough just to be able to talk about abortion after all those years of societally imposed silence. Action could come later, and it would, of course, because those meetings, with all their shared intensity, planted the seeds of reform.
Like so many other women of their generation, Coffee and Weddington were swept up into the women’s movement. In law school, each woman joined a consciousness-raising group. Although they had no way of knowing it then, they would soon have more reason than most women their age to become involved in the women’s movement. Weddington and Coffee were two of five women in the freshman law school class of 1965 at the University of Texas. They were the only two who were planning to practice law; the rest were married and had decided to postpone law careers to start families. It was just as well, as Coffee and Weddington would discover, since obtaining a law degree in 1969 was no guarantee that a woman would be able to practice law.
The ideas of attending law school did not dawn on either woman until both were almost through with undergraduate school. Few women planned to have any kind of career at that time, and there were many stumbling blocks even for those ambitious enough to want one.
Coffee was finishing undergraduate school at Rice when she began to weigh what she would do next. She knew only that she wanted to have a serious career. No one she knew encouraged or discouraged her when she began to look into law school. The law seemed like a good-enough choice for her because she thought she had an orderly, logical mind. Her parents supported her choice only to the extent of telling her they preferred law to teaching. Coffee’s father was a research chemist, and her mother had worked off and on as a judge’s secretary, so the idea of a professional daughter probably appealed to them.
Coffee was born in Houston but had moved to Dallas when she was a small child. Having rarely been outside Texas, she felt most comfortable there and decided to apply to the University of Texas. When she was accepted, she felt pleased but not surprised. Her undergraduate record was excellent.
Despite the fact that she was readily accepted, her parents proved to be less than eager to pay for her advanced education. They offered a little financial support during her first year of law school. That and a loan from an aunt guaranteed that she would be able to devote her energies to her courses. Student loans paid the way her second year. By the third year, Coffee was doing well enough to support herself while she attended school full-time.
Weddington, the daughter of a Methodist minister and a teacher, basked in the attention she received as a child from her father’s congregations. She soon learned what pleased the adults—a smiling face, a willingness to help when needed, and a drive to be the best at whatever she tried.
Despite frequent moves throughout her childhood (she lived in Dallas while her father finished seminary; in Abilene, where he taught religion; in Wiley, where he tended his first congregation; and in Munday, Canyon, and Vernon), her school record was excellent, and she would always be proud of it. After skipping sixth grade and a year of high school, she went off to McMurry College, a small Methodist church school, from which she graduated at age nineteen in 1965.
In interviews, Weddington speaks more often of her mother than her father, always referring to her as an educator, never a housewife. She was proud of the fact that her mother completed a master’s degree in education while she was in high school and liked to recall that her mother and a friend of her mother’s encouraged her to go to law school.
Her father appears to have been a more distant figure, but it was from him that she derived much of her image of herself. Long after she had seen something of the world and accomplished many things on her own, the fact that she was a minister’s daughter still provided a frame of reference for much of what she saw and did.
As a child Weddington rarely traveled outside Texas and then only to church meetings. People who knew her in her twenties recall her freshness and innocence. Her husband, Ron, whom she met in law school and married shortly after she graduated, was considered the “outgoing, social Weddington,” while Sarah’s “natural reserve made her the quieter, less partygoing type.”
Weddington’s family could not afford to send her to law school, but hard work was nothing new to Sarah, who had held various jobs since junior high school. To support herself in law school, she worked as a records librarian for a hospital, an assistant housemother, and a free-lance typist.
She began to toy with the idea of graduate school as she was finishing undergraduate school. She wanted to get some kind of advanced degree and thought for a while that she might continue in English, her undergraduate major. But while doing her student teaching, she realized that teaching held little reward for her. She did not feel that it offered as much of an opportunity to have an impact on people’s lives as she wanted. More important, she disliked the fact that her success was so directly dependent upon others. She briefly considered medicine but had not taken enough science courses to get into a good medical school. She began to think about law school.
Her interest in politics undoubtedly provided an added incentive to study law. When she graduated from undergraduate school at McMurry College, her family was living in Vernon, Texas. Weddington’s mother took her and her brother to see their representative in the state legislature, who as a family friend was delighted to help them both acquire jobs in the state Capitol. Her brother became a page, and she worked as a clerk-typist and legal proofer in a department of the Texas legislature.
Even though the Texas legislature only met every other year for four months, life was intensely political in Texas and especially in Austin, its capital city. Sarah took to the hustle and bustle that echoed through the halls of the elegant, brownstone-Victorian statehouse, and it was while working there that she began to seriously consider the idea of a law degree. At that time, most law schools still admitted people with a variety of undergraduate degrees, including liberal arts, and the University of Texas automatically admitted anyone above a certain grade-point average. Weddington had always been an excellent student. She decided to apply to the University of Texas Law School.
During Weddington’s admissions interview, the dean of the law school tried to discourage her by emphasizing how difficult his son was finding the law school. Typically, Weddington was merely spurred on by the dean’s words: “Being redheaded, I rose to the challenge and decided I was sure going to go to law school.” Weddington would later recall of her decision: “I think in some ways I just never questioned that I couldn’t do it. I’d always made excellent grades. . . . I can’t remember worrying about whether I could make it through law school. I just figured if I wanted to, I could do it.”
Do it she did. Weddington graduated from the University of Texas Law School in 1967—at the tender age of twenty-one. She had spent a record twenty-seven months in law school and had supported herself the entire time. She would later note ruefully that she was so frugal she managed to save money while paying her own way.
Neither Coffee nor Weddington found law school difficult, and that only made them even more unprepared for what awaited them upon graduation. They soon discovered that while they might be, in theory, valued commodities as lawyers, they were nowhere near as valuable as their male colleagues. Both women, ambitious for the same things as their male colleagues, told me how they had expected the major law firms to wine and dine them just as they did the men, after which several offers would be forthcoming. In the late sixties, employers in some parts of the country were actively seeking women to work for them, if only as tokens of equal opportunity. The good old boys who dominated life in Texas, however, had not caught up with the rest of the country; women were still an unwanted, mistrusted, and largely undesirable commodity in Texas boardrooms and law firms—except, of course, as secretaries.
Coffee, who was Order of the Coif and had been invited to join the law review in her senior year (although the honor came too late, and she was unable to accept it because of other time commitments), thought that working for a judge would put her in even better stead for the corporate position she eventually hoped to land. She applied for and landed a highly coveted clerk’s job on the prestigious Fifth Circuit, among the most active of the federal benches.
With a bent for real estate and corporate law, she had assumed she would have no trouble joining a major Dallas firm after her year of clerking. To her surprise, her only offer came from a small firm in Dallas that specialized in bankruptcy law. Although bankruptcy’s star has since ascended, in the late 1960s it was not an area of the law that bright, eager young law school graduates were burning to get into. If anything, it was looked upon as something only slightly removed from ambulance chasing. Coffee was offered the position with Palmer and Palmer, a small corporate firm, not so much because of her stellar record but because the firm needed to hire a young lawyer, and she was one of the few willing to do bankruptcy law.
Weddington was more confident than Coffee that she would be able to open the door to some important corporate firm. She rarely failed once she put her mind to something, and she took pride in her ability not only to be a team player, but also to play the game the way the coaches wanted it played. She was and has for the most part remained the consummate corporate woman, attuned to achieving her goals by working within the system. To build up her résumé, she had begun to work part-time with a law professor named John Sutton on a special project for the American Bar Association even before she graduated.
Weddington was thrilled to be the first woman in her class who was invited to fly to Dallas for an interview with a major law firm. Her hopes were shattered, however, when she realized that the firm had no intention of hiring her or any other woman. The partners, perhaps feeling some pressure to hire a woman but clearly unwilling to do so, let the interview disintegrate into a discussion of why they could not hire her.
One partner told her, in all seriousness as far as she could tell, that lawyers used foul language in conferences, language that might offend her. Worse, another lawyer commented, the only way to train a clerk was to “cuss him out occasionally,” and they just would not feel comfortable doing that to someone as pretty and sweet as she apparently was. Besides, they noted, she had a husband. Wouldn’t she need to be home to cook dinner for him? Lawyers, especially young lawyers, worked long hours. How could she possibly work the hours a job with their firm would require and handle her obligations at home?
The final problem with hiring her, as far as the partners were concerned, was that their wives had reservations about having them working with professional women. Secretaries were enough of a threat without adding attractive new law school graduates, women who would be colleagues. They were sure she would sympathize with their wives’ thinking and perhaps even share it one day if she did not now. Before Weddington left the firm, she knew that an offer would not be forthcoming.
Without the law firm job she had hoped to obtain, Sarah continued working for John Sutton on the ABA ethics project after she graduated. The job actually worked out well, since her husband, whom she had met on a blind date her last year of law school and had married shortly after graduation, was still finishing law school. He was Sarah’s age, but serving in the military had put him a year behind her. The job also gave her an opportunity to travel all over the country meeting other lawyers, some of whom would be invaluable contacts to her in her future work. It was during this period that she developed a lifelong appetite for travel. The result of her two and one half years of committee work was the Code of Professional Responsibility, a book that is still widely used by lawyers and state bar associations.
Spurned by the big law firms, Weddington found herself even more interested than she might otherwise have been in the women’s movement. She had joined Austin’s first consciousness-raising group during law school and now became active in the National Organization for Women (NOW) and Planned Parenthood. She also joined a group of Texas women who were trying to find women to run for public office.
Had she joined a law firm, Weddington’s feminist side might never have developed so fully. Like most junior members of such firms, she would have had little spare time for any kind of extracurricular activity, and she would not have been encouraged to pursue anything related to the women’s movement, which was viewed as a radical activity in Texas. If Sarah, a traditionalist to the core, had a radical feminist period, this was it. An acquaintance recalls her appearing at the many meetings that filled her life at that time wearing a black cape—fairly avant-garde garb in a state like Texas, where women were given to wearing pastel colors and dainty prints.
Weddington’s first involvement with abortion occurred when she was still living in Austin and working for the bar association. A group of women who were loosely affiliated with the University of Texas—students and staff—approached her at a garage sale and asked if she would help them organize a problem-pregnancy counseling service. She would later recall having jumped at the chance not so much because it involved abortion as because it gave her a chance to practice law.
Pregnancy counseling services were springing up all over the country, in emulation of the first, bravely named New York group called the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion. Formed in 1967 by the Reverend Howard Moody of the Judson Memorial Church, a longtime social activist, and twenty-one other Protestant and Jewish clergymen, CCS was a response to growing concern over the millions of women who were forced into illegal abortions every year, many at great risk to themselves.
The counseling services, which required no money or accepted only nominal fees, advised pregnant women about the choices open to them if they did not want to have a baby and referred them to sources of help—either adoption agencies or abortion services. Most of the women who sought counseling, about 95 percent of CCS cases, for example, chose abortion.
The services were a brilliant and in retrospect rather flagrant form of civil rebellion. They advertised openly, making little attempt to hide what they were doing; most practiced some circumspection, however, refusing, for example, to refer women to doctors over the telephone and insisting that the service did not provide abortions, only abortion conseling. In one or two states, a person who counseled abortion was considered an accomplice to the crime, but even where this was not the case, referral services obviously fell into an indeterminate gray area regarding their legality. Obviously one of their goals was to subvert the abortion laws. The pioneering clergy-run services were especially successful, largely because law enforcement agencies were reluctant to take on the clergy. The clergymen, in turn, lent credibility to the abortion-reform movement and made people see that abortion was an issue that could no longer be ignored.
The New York services sent women to Puerto Rico and, when abortion became legal in England in 1968, to London. Sometimes women were sent to Eastern European countries and Scandinavia, where abortion was either legal or illegal but accessible. Texas and California women were sent to Mexican clinics that had been inspected and preapproved by the people who ran the services. Even though abortion was illegal in Mexico, a Catholic country, the laws were ignored, and an abortion was easily obtained.
In addition, illegal abortionists thrived in most towns of any size across the United States, and referral services used them if they were skilled and reputable. The organization also referred women to private physicians who were brave enough to do in-office abortions.
The services were a response to the fact that a legal abortion was almost impossible to arrange. Only eight to ten thousand were done each year throughout the country, compared with the million to a million and a half illegal abortions that experts such as Planned Parenthood and the National Committee on Maternal Health estimated were obtained each year. A legal abortion could only be gotten through a physician, who could and frequently did exercise his own personal judgment about which of his patients were entitled to one; and these were done in hospitals, which were reluctant to permit them. Even large metropolitan hospitals averaged only twenty-five to thirty-five a year.
Hospital abortions were reserved primarily for women with clout—doctors’ wives, the woman whose husband had donated a wing to a hospital, wives and teen-age daughters of families lucky enough to count a physician as a personal friend. To put it bluntly, to the extent that abortion was legally available, a rich, well-connected woman always had a better chance of getting one than did a poor woman with no connections. One doctor at a major Texas hospital summed up the prevailing philosophy among his colleagues: “There are only so many times you’re going to go to bat against the [hospital] administration, that you like to save it for regular patients.”
Poor women were another story entirely. As evidence of the discrimination against them, lawyer Harriet Pilpel, who was active in birth control and later the abortion-reform movement, testified before the New York State Assembly in 1967 (when New York activists were trying to pass a reform law) that the ratio of abortions to live births for private patients in New York State was 1 to 250, whereas for ward service it was 1 to 10,000. Most poor women lacked a network of friends and acquaintances who could direct them to the skilled local abortionist, and those who could find one frequently did not have the funds to pay for his services, which ranged from $250 to $1,000.
More often than not, poor women got the bad abortions. They became the bloody statistics, their heart-rending stories plastered across the front pages of newspapers. By 1968 abortion was a relatively safe medical procedure, but it could and did turn foul when done on a dirty kitchen table with septic instruments by an unskilled abortionist. The counseling services that sprang up across the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s were as much as anything an attempt to provide abortion services to all women and not just the fortunate few who had the right connections.
The Austin group that asked Weddington to work with them intended to run a straightforward referral and counseling service, and to this aim they hoped that legal counsel would help them avoid any clashes with the law. Although willing to skirt the law, they were not seeking to challenge it openly.
As Weddington worked with the group and learned more about abortion, she developed a desire to do even more than she was. One day she decided to get in touch with Linda Coffee, partly because she was the only other woman from her law school class who was practicing, but also because while they were in law school together they had occasionally talked to one another about women’s lives and issues. She thought Coffee might be interested in helping her do something about abortion.
After her disappointment over not receiving an offer from a major law firm when she finished her clerkship, Coffee, like Weddington, had involved herself more deeply in feminist concerns. She had joined NOW and was also active in a Dallas-based feminist group called the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL), which worked for better employment opportunities for women. Unlike Weddington, Coffee was quick to call herself a feminist. She would later tell me she was the “only feminist lawyer in Dallas,” that she alone went out of her way to use the label at a time when most active professional women would not touch feminism with a ten-foot pole out of fear that doing so would jeopardize their careers.
Although the two women had not been friends in college, they were now drawn together by their common interest in women’s lives. They spent hours on the telephone and occasionally met in person. During this period they compared their lives, sharing stories about the doors that had been closed to them professionally and always thinking about what they could do to change things.
Their discussions invariably returned to abortion and what could be done about it. Like many women, they were finally beginning to see, as de Beauvoir had predicted, that women needed to be able to control their fertility to be free—and that abortion was one key to doing so. The idea that women could not control when and under what circumstances they would choose to reproduce struck them as unfair—the one thing that truly hindered women as they planned careers. They began to talk about what specifically might be done to change the Texas abortion law.
One possible means of change, a painstakingly slow one, was the state legislature. But that would require the cooperation of Texas state legislators, most of whom wanted nothing to do with “libbers’ ” causes or even, for that matter, causes of women who were not “libbers.” Besides, Weddington and Coffee had no political clout with the Texas state legislature—and, in fact, they knew few Texas women who did.
A court challenge was the other possibility, one that seemed more viable. The courts, especially the federal benches and the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, were the scene of most battles over civil rights legislation in the reform-oriented 1960s, in large part because they had proved to be the branch of government most receptive to social change. Of course, a court challenge could drag on, too, as witnessed by the years of courtroom squabbling that had followed the Supreme Court decision ordering the desegregation of public schools. The city of Dallas had been embroiled in a suit to work out an acceptable desegregation plan for almost a decade.
Coffee had experience with the judicial system, and that would be helpful. Another advantage to a court challenge was the element of surprise it would provide. Law enforcement officials would not be expecting a court challenge, so the state might not offer much opposition. All things considered, both women thought the courts were probably the way to go, in Texas at least. They decided they would each begin looking for a potential test case to take into court.
In all their hours of planning and speculating, the one thing the two young, inexperienced lawyers never discussed or even considered was their boldness in planning to challenge a state law. This was because the idea of taking on a state government or even the federal government, for that matter, was not as unusual or difficult a task in the late 1960s as it has since become. In those heady days of civil rights activity, countless lawyers, many of them fresh out of law school and imbued with a sense of idealism, were hoping and praying to make their mark somewhere. At issue was not so much whether they would challenge a law, but which law they would challenge. Coffee and Weddington later admitted they were simply too young and inexperienced to understand fully what they were taking on. In one of her rare expansive moods, Coffee told me, “When you’re young, you have high aspirations, and you just do what needs to be done.”
The first order of business was to find a suitable plaintiff. Thinking that their best resources were the numerous feminist organizations that they had joined, each woman stepped up her activities, Weddington in Austin, where she was still living at that time, and Coffee in Dallas. Both women made themselves available as speakers on the subject of abortion. They gave speeches intended to educate women on the need for abortion reform, but always, as they made the rounds of various women’s groups, the more traditional volunteer groups as well as the feminist ones, each was looking for a certain kind of woman, someone with the potential to become an abortion-case plaintiff.
It was also not unusual for a lawyer who was looking for a plaintiff in a test case to put out feelers among his or her colleagues to be on the lookout for someone suitable, and Coffee had done that in Dallas.
For a while, Weddington was hopeful that a plaintiff could be found among the women in the problem-pregnancy counseling group—if not among the organizers, then among the women they counseled. She met several times with the abortion-counseling group to discuss the possibility of developing a test case. She talked about what was needed to overturn the laws, how such a case would proceed, and of the demands that might be made of anyone who volunteered to become a plaintiff. Gradually, though, her hopes faded, at least for finding a plaintiff among the referral group. One problem was that most of the women who sought counseling knew they wanted an abortion. The sooner a woman underwent an abortion, the healthier it was for her, and few were willing—or could justifiably be asked—to risk the delay that even brief legal proceedings might entail.
The other possibility was to use a member of the referral group who happened to be pregnant, even a woman who did not want an abortion but was willing to claim that she did in order to press an abortion suit against the state. It certainly was not Weddington’s first choice to use a kind of trumped-up defendant, but if no one else turned up, she realized that it might be her only option. That might be more humane in the long run, anyway, since she knew that any suit she filed would most likely not be decided in time for a plaintiff to undergo an abortion.
Still another thought was to file a class-action suit using the Austin referral group. The members were eager to help in any way they could, so much so that when Weddington once asked if anyone in the group happened to be pregnant, several voices chorused, “No, but that can be arranged.” The problem with using the group was that at least one plaintiff had to be representative of the class. In this case, that meant pregnant and desiring an abortion.
Coffee, too, had begun to do more public speaking in Dallas in an attempt to find a plaintiff. One night, at a meeting of a feminist-oriented group, Coffee was approached by a couple who began to talk to her about her work in abortion reform. Eventually the couple got around to suggesting that they might be willing to become plaintiffs in an abortion suit. The woman told Coffee that since 1968 she had suffered from a neural-chemical condition that caused backaches and depression severe enough that her physician had suggested she not become pregnant for the time being. She had to stop using the Pill, then the most reliable form of birth control, because it blurred her vision. Four months after the onset of her physical problems, she had become pregnant. Apart from her illness, she and her husband did not feel they were ready for a child, so they decided on an abortion. Through an abortion-counseling service, the woman had made arrangements to obtain an abortion at a clinic outside the United States.
Despite using contraception, the couple were worried that the woman might become pregnant again. They could not afford another abortion if it meant traveling outside the country. In an interview they would later give to Barbara Richardson, a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald, they shed more light on their willingness to become plaintiffs. Both felt a “moral imperative” to help legalize abortion. The husband added: “Our personal, moral, and ethical codes were outraged by the law.”
On the one hand, Coffee thought the couple would make excellent plaintiffs. They were impressive: young, married two years, both professionals with advanced degrees, churchgoing Methodists, active and involved in community life, and most important, they had an excellent reason for using abortion as a method of backup birth control.
On the other hand, there were problems with using them, not least of which would be the need to explain to the court why the woman’s own physician had not done an abortion when she became pregnant. Coffee suspected that although the woman’s physical condition was serious, it was not really so threatening that she could not bear a child.
The biggest drawback to using the couple as plaintiffs was that their case was weak, legally speaking. Like most other states, Texas permitted abortion to save the mother’s life, and the present law could easily be interpreted as sufficient to cover their situation. Coffee believed the case would be thrown out of court on the grounds that it involved no controversy. Such an evasive action would have particular appeal, Coffee feared, to a judge who was not eager to become involved in something as controversial as abortion.
Despite several major disadvantages to using the couple, Coffee decided to go ahead and try to build a case around them anyway, largely because in several months of looking for a plaintiff, she had not found anyone else. Meanwhile, she would continue her search. The young couple were eager to protect their anonymity, so they agreed with Coffee to be known only as John and Mary Doe.
A few weeks later Coffee thought she might have found not one but several other plaintiffs in the local Unitarian Church’s women’s group. In Dallas Unitarians were viewed as being on the cutting edge of social reform, which meant that they were not merely liberal but active in liberal causes. Their interest in abortion had grown out of a national annual meeting at which abortion had been the topic several years earlier. One member of the group had returned to Dallas with a sense of urgency about the need to reform the abortion laws. She urged the group to study abortion, which they did. Some of the women heard Coffee speak elsewhere on the subject of abortion reform and wanted her to address their group to tell them what they might be doing to promote liberalization of abortion laws.
The night she spoke, Coffee talked at length about the case she hoped to develop with the Does as plaintiffs. She had come to the meeting with a vivacious, dark-haired young woman, whom several group members were thrilled to realize must be the Mary Doe Coffee was talking about. As soon as Coffee finished speaking, several women raised the question of whether they as a group might not become plaintiffs in a class-action suit.
Coffee was interested in class-action suits, having worked on several, and she knew they were enjoying considerable receptivity in the federal courts at that time. Although she had not been thinking in terms of a class-action suit, one might be a possibility. She soon rejected the idea, however. The Dallas women would not make good plaintiffs for the same reason the Austin referral service would not: none of the women was pregnant. To appease their disappointment, Coffee suggested that the Unitarian women might want to prepare an amicus curiae, or friend-of-the-court, brief to support her case, which they eagerly agreed to do.
Convinced she would find no other plaintiff, Coffee decided to move ahead as quickly as possible with the Does’ case. Then, in early December 1969, just as she was about to file a lawsuit, luck struck in the form of a potential plaintiff who was suitable for the case, if only because she was pregnant and wanted an abortion.
Coffee learned about Norma McCorvey through a colleague, Henry McCloskey. The two women met for the first time in McCloskey’s office. From the start Coffee was interested in McCorvey. Within a few days she met with her once more alone so that she could hear more about Norma’s situation and background.
The next time Coffee talked to Weddington, she described Norma McCorvey to her. Weddington was enthusiastic, so much so that she asked Coffee if she might join her in the suit as co-counsel. Coffee was not surprised at the request to join forces officially, since they had in effect been working together unofficially for the better part of a year. She could see the advantages of having someone to work with. As an overworked junior partner in her law firm, she worried that she would not have as much time as she would like to work on the case. She had already rejected the idea of asking to do the case pro bono; it was too radical for that. With two people, the work could be divided. She also welcomed Weddington’s thoughts and ideas about how best to approach the issues. And of course, the bottom line was that it would be fun to have someone to share the excitement with. Coffee had a feeling this case might generate a lot of that.