Roe V. Wade
Over the past century women have fought for expanded rights within the United States government and society. There has been a revolution in the legal, civil, and social rights of women throughout the country. It began with the right to vote. Once granted, women moved on to challenge every other aspect of American life. In the forties, they demanded equality in the workplace. In the sixties, women held their own in the fight for Civil Rights. And in the seventies women sought to bring about the independent woman. This new, liberated individual pursued the controversial issues of the home on the legal battlefield and the home front. Among the first of these liberations was the right to birth-control and abortion.
Norma McCorvey, a twenty-one year old, unmarried, pregnant woman went to several Dallas physicians seeking an abortion but was refused because of the law. In the summer of 1965 she went to the local legal aid office for help. Attorney Sarah Weddington and her colleague Linda Coffee, who were interested in filing an abortion suit against the state government, approached her. McCorvey agreed to play their plaintiff under the alias of Jane Roe. On March 3, 1970, Coffee filed a three-page complaint against Dallas County district attorney Henry B. Wade in the Dallas federal courthouse calling for both declaratory and injunctive relief. McCorvey submitted an affidavit to the Fifth Circuit Federal Court that she wished to “terminate my pregnancy because of the economic hardship which my pregnancy entailed and because of the social stigma attached to the bearing of illegitimate children in our society. I fear that my very life would be endangered if I submitted to an abortion which I could afford [here alluding to the fact that she could not travel out of state, and therefor her only options would be an illegal or self/home abortion, both very dangerous at the time.]” (Frost-Knappman 315) After hearing the arguments, the Fifth Circuit Federal...