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23 cm, 306, illus., appendix, index. Inscribed by the author on the fep. The inscription reads To Betsey Haywood--Thanks for your pro-choice support! Sarah Weddington 10.5.92. The author recounts the story of her legal battle and victory and discusses the political and religious right's attack on women's right to choose. Sarah Catherine Ragle Weddington (February 5, 1945 December 26, 2021) was an attorney, law professor, advocate for women's rights and reproductive health, and member of the Texas House of Representatives. She represented "Jane Roe" (real name Norma McCorvey) in the landmark Roe v. Wade case before the United States Supreme Court. She also was the first female General Counsel for the US Department of Agriculture. In May 1970, Weddington first stated her case in front of a three-judge district court in Dallas. The court agreed that the Texas abortion laws were unconstitutional, state appealed the decision, landing it before the United States Supreme Court. In 1971 and again in 1972, Weddington appeared before the Supreme Court. When she appeared before the Supreme Court, Weddington had never tried a legal case. Her argument was based on the 1st, 4th, 5th, 8th, 9th, and 14th amendments, as well as the Court's decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized the sale of contraceptives. In 1973, the Court's decision was handed down, overturning Texas abortion law by a 7-2 majority and legalizing abortion throughout the U. S. In 1992, Weddington compiled her experiences with the case and interviews with the people involved into a book titled A Question of Choice. Derived from a Kirkus review: The lawyer who argued Roe v. Wade presents a compelling memoir of her handling of that seminal 1973 Supreme Court case into which she weaves her own biography; a history of the abortion- rights struggle; and an idealistic call to combat political and judicial forces that seek to narrow or overturn Roe. Roe v. Wade has been condemned as a raw exercise in judicial policy-making, and as lacking an explicit basis in the Constitution, but for Weddington it represents the fulfillment of a fundamental constitutional right. The case's genesis was astonishingly humble and personal: Weddington became passionately committed to the struggle for abortion rights as a young woman who had to go to Mexico for an abortion in order to elude rigid anti-abortion laws in Texas. The litigation began as an explicit act of social engineering. Bringing a class action as a young lawyer who had never argued a contested case, Weddington began at the district-court level by arguing in part that the reasoning in the Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut which found a constitutional right to privacy in striking down a Connecticut law banning contraceptives should apply to invalidate the restrictive abortion law in Texas. Weddington gives the reader enough legal analysis to understand the reasoning behind Roe, but her primary focus isn't on constitutional law, but on what she views as the elemental nature of abortion rights and the meaning of such rights for American women. She recounts her own prominent post-Roe role in Democratic party politics, and discusses subsequent Supreme Court abortion-rights cases. Her account culminates in professions of concern for the future of abortion rights and in a ``Plan for Action,'' in which she makes specific suggestions for political activism. Weddington inadequately addresses legal objections to Roe, but she gives valuable, passionate insights into the significance of that historic case.
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