Sarah Weddington Offers Insight, Humor at American Constitution Society Talk

Sarah Weddington has made a career of doing things that others told her she couldn’t do because of her sex.

As a senior in college, she wanted to, “teach eighth graders to love Beowulf.” But when she realized that she wasn’t cut out for the teacher’s life, she started thinking about law school. That’s when people started telling her that she couldn’t be a lawyer because she was a woman.

“They told me it would be too hard, and that’s when I knew I had to go,” she said with a wry smile - drawing a chuckle from the crowd of one hundred or so gathered on a cool, sunny Thursday afternoon at the Law Offices of Preston, Gates, and Ellis.

Weddington is a warm, youthful woman with a genuine smile. Before the talk started, she was gracious enough to offer her assistance in setting up tables and putting out lunches for the guests. It was a quiet offer to the event’s organizers, made privately and without pretense. I was just in the right place at the right time to overhear it. And it made me realize that despite having won the most famous case to come before the Supreme Court since Brown vs. Board of Education, Weddington doesn’t hold herself above other people.

To give her audience some context for early 70’s - the era in which she tried and won Roe v. Wade - Weddington told the us about the first time she applied for a credit card.

“The banker told me that I would need my husband’s signature on the application,” she said. “So I told him that I was the one working, putting my husband through law school after his tour of duty, and that I didn’t think I should have to get his signature on anything. But the banker didn’t really seem to care what I thought, so I decided to run for the Texas House, pass equality in lending legislation, and then go back and get my credit card.”

In 1970, her life took a dramatic turn. Weddington was approached by a group of people who ran a service referring women to safe, illegal abortions. They wanted to know if they could be prosecuted under Texas law as accomplices to abortion.

“Roe was my first contested case. I’d done a couple of divorces, a will and an adoption for my uncle. I didn’t anticipate that our case would be the one heard by the Supreme Court. So you can imagine my surprise when I got a letter saying that they were going to hear our arguments.”

We all know the story of that case. If you want to read it in her own words, I suggest you pick up her book, A Question of Choice. It’s a terrific, exhilarating narrative, but I’m not going to recount it here. Because despite the humor and sense of history that Weddington exhibits when recounting that tale, it’s the future of Roe that she wants to talk about.

The way Weddington sees it, the Supreme Court is divided into three blocs: those justices who do not want to reconsider Roe, those who would overturn Roe, and a coalition of swing votes in the middle.

“Sandra Day O’Connor is the centerpiece of that coalition,” says Weddington with urgency, “that’s why this nomination is so important.”

Once, when asked if she would ever accept a nomination to the Supreme Court, Weddington answered that she didn’t believe she was qualified.

“Now I feel overqualified,” she says, drawing abrupt snorts from the many judges seated in the room. “At least I’ve tried a case before the Supreme Court. I supported Miers to be head of the Texas Bar Association because I thought it was important we have a first woman in the role, but it takes a lot more to sit on the Supreme Court than it does to lead the Texas Bar.”

And indeed, as a woman lawyer from Texas, Weddington has more insight into Harriet Miers than most.

“There are two kinds of women who get ahead,” she says, “those who reach back and help other women come up behind them, and those who get where they’ve gotten by not kicking up sand. Miers is the latter.”

Weddington also drew attention to the scolding Miers recently recieved from the Senate Judiciary Committee when they sent her pre-hearing questionnaire back as “inadequate, insufficient and insulting,” particularly with regard to the alleged back-room assurances that right-wing leaders have recieved about Miers’ position on abortion.

“There have been e-mails floating around between right-wing leaders, administration officials, and Miers’ personal friends - giving assurances that if confirmed, Miers would be a ‘vote you could count on,’ to support the president.”

In response to the section asking how she would recuse herself were a case involving the current administration to come before the high court, Miers wrote the statutes regulating recusals on the lower courts verbatim.

“There might just be some conflict of interest issues here,” says Weddington.

The reproductive rights issues that could come before Miers - if she’s confirmed - are myriad. She could weigh in on the challenge to the late term abortion ban that is now climbing through the ranks of the federal judiciary, the New Hampshire law requiring parental consent for an abortion for a minor with no exception for the health of the woman, or even the right to get birth control pills when a pharmacist has an objection to filling the prescription.

But Weddington is crictical of those Democrats who are still holding back on opposing Miers for fear that another nominee would be even worse. “We have to take these nominations one at a time,” she says, “we can’t anticipate who the next nominee will be.”

I left the talk feeling exhliarated to have met Weddington, but sobered by her vision of the future of Roe and the high court. In the midst of this anti-feminist backlash, we must honor Weddington and the other women whose work has laid the groundwork for today’s feminists - we must oppose Harriet Miers. Even if the next nominee could be worse. Even if Congress tears itself apart. At all costs.

Call your Senators today.