Sarah Weddington’s Unexpected Path to <em>Roe</em>
When Sarah Weddington, who died last week at the age of 76, first argued Roe v. Wade before the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1971, she was just four years out of law school at the University of Texas at Austin. Little in her early life foreshadowed the key role she would play in the fight for abortion rights. Weddington was the daughter of a Methodist minister in Abilene, Texas. She had headed her high-school chapter of the Future Homemakers of America and had been assistant house mother for the Delta Gamma sorority. Weddington’s legal background was also atypical, to say the least, for members of the Supreme Court bar. When she stood before the justices, age 26, she had handled nothing more, she would recall, than “uncontested divorces, wills for people with no money, and an adoption for my uncle.”
But as Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed, “the life of the, a quarter century later.
