Hanta Yo
Well-known member
This was in the Billings Gazette today, I thought was interesting reading since I didn't know in Roe vs Wade that Roe was a made up name for someone who didn't get the abortion and took the anti-abortion side. Just curious about your opinions here....it surprises me that the Billings Gazette, being liberal that it is, would print this.
This looks like it was really Weddington's fight, not Roe.
Here's the website:
http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2008/03/07/news/local/35-roewade.txt
Here's the article:
This looks like it was really Weddington's fight, not Roe.
Here's the website:
http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2008/03/07/news/local/35-roewade.txt
Here's the article:
Roe v. Wade attorney to speak
By DIANE COCHRAN
Of the Gazette Staff
Thirty-five years after she successfully argued Roe v. Wade at the U.S. Supreme Court, the story of Sarah Weddington's life has become the stuff of legend.
Weddington was 26 when she appeared before the nation's highest court with co-counsel Linda Coffee, and she had never before handled a contested case.
She was the first woman from her college to attend law school - she'd been told by an undergraduate dean that women couldn't be lawyers - and no law firm would hire her after graduation because of her gender.
She grew up in Texas in an era when women could not get credit cards without a man's permission, and girls couldn't play full-court basketball in school because it was thought to damage their reproductive systems. "That was our meal ticket," said Weddington, who will speak in Billings next week. As a young lawyer doing research for a law professor at the University of Texas, Weddington was sympathetic to the movement to legalize abortion in the United States. She and her boyfriend, whom she later married, had gone to Mexico for an illegal abortion while Weddington was a law student.
"Relatively few women remember what it was like before Roe v. Wade," Weddington said. Roe v. Wade is the 1973 decision that recognized a constitutional right to obtain an abortion under most circumstances during the first six months of pregnancy.
Unmarried women often could not access reliable contraception, and some who became pregnant were desperate to end their pregnancies.
Women sometimes became so desperate that they risked their lives at the hands of unlicensed practitioners in unsafe clinics or by trying to self-abort with sharp objects or dangerous concoctions with ingredients such as bleach.
"We have generally never had to face and, I hope, never have to face those dark days again," said Stacy James, chief executive officer for Planned Parenthood of Montana, which is bringing Weddington to Billings. "We just can't go back to those times."
James said her own bled to death19-year-old grandmother after an illegal abortion during the Great Depression. The family could not afford to feed another child, James said.
"If you don't have control over when and if you want to procreate, you lose a lot of hope for the future and your child's future," James said. "To think that 35 years later we are having the same conversation, that's really frightening."
When it was decided in 1973 in favor of the woman Weddington called Jane Roe, the Roe v. Wade case legalized abortion in the United States.
Jane Roe, whose real name was Norma McCorvey, did not have an abortion and later became a vocal opponent of the procedure.
The Supreme Court decision also spawned decades of protest from people who oppose abortion, many of whom organized and successfully lobbied state governments to enact laws limiting access to abortion.
"We've taken some steps backward with barriers being added," James said. "The louder, more radical anti-choice crowd has really silenced the voice of reason."
Weddington said surveys show that the majority of Americans think abortion should be legal. But she said the vocal minority could help sway the opinion of the Supreme Court.
If the court were to hear another abortion case and reverse its opinion in Roe, vital gains made by women in the past few decades would be erased, Weddington said.
"It is, in part, a moral issue," Weddington said of abortion. "We recognize different people have different moral standards and religious standards. We don't try to force (them) on anybody else.
"I'm not trying to change someone's position," she said. "But women should be able to make their own choices."
Contact Diane Cochran at [email protected] or 657-1287.