Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who successfully litigated the landmark Roe v. Abortion rights case. Wade before the Supreme Court of the United States in 1973, died Sunday at 76, according to one of his former students.
In 1973, Sarah Weddington and fellow lawyer Linda Coffee filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of a pregnant woman challenging a law in the state of Texas that prohibited abortions.
“She litigated with Linda Coffee in what was the first case of her career, Roe v. Wade, when she was just out of law school,” wrote Susan Hays, one of Sarah Weddington’s former students, on Twitter.
“She was my teacher” and “opened my eyes to the fragility of my rights and my freedom,” she said, adding that the lawyer had succumbed to “a series of health problems “.
The “Jane Roe” case – real name Norma McCorvey – brought against Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade ultimately came to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of abortion rights.
The right to abortion in the United States – which is not guaranteed by federal law – has since been based on this jurisprudence: the landmark Supreme Court decision, “Roe v. Wade” of 1973.
In this judgment, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution guaranteed the right of women to have an abortion and that the States could not deprive them of it. In 1992, she clarified that this right was valid as long as the fetus is not “viable”, that is to say around 22 to 24 weeks of pregnancy.
However, a majority of the judges of the Supreme Court of the United States seems today tempted to modify this legal framework which for nearly 50 years has guaranteed the right of American women to have an abortion, either by restricting it or by simply canceling it.
US President Joe Biden assured on December 1 that he “continued” to support the “Roe v. Wade” case law, which founds the right to abortion in the United States.
The historic stop “Roe v. Wade” looks like a house on the edge of a beach that threatens to take water and collapse “, warned Sarah Weddington in 1998.