Sarah R Weddington

Ms. Weddington was 26 and had never tried a legal case when she and Linda Coffee, her co-counsel, went before the Supreme Court in 1971. Their legal battle culminated on Jan. 22, 1973, when the court ruled in one of the most consequential decisions in American history that a Texas state law banning abortions except to save the woman’s life was unconstitutional. Ms. Weddington and Ms. Coffee were recent graduates of the University of Texas School of Law in Austin. Ms. Coffee was practicing law in Dallas and had more experience, having clerked for Sarah T. Hughes, a well-known federal district judge. Sarah Catherine Ragle was born on Feb. 5, 1945, in Abilene, Texas. Her father, the Rev. Herbert Doyle Ragle, was a Methodist minister. Her mother, Lena Catherine (Morrison) Ragle, taught business courses at the college level. She enrolled at McMurry College, now McMurry University, a small Methodist school in Abilene. She majored in English and graduated magna cum laude at age 19 in 1964. She earned her law degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1967. She and her boyfriend, Ron Weddington, who would become her husband in 1968, drove to Mexico, where she said she had a safe abortion. While waiting in 1972 for the Supreme Court to hand down its decision in Roe v. Wade, Ms. Weddington ran for and won a seat in the Texas House. With Ann Richards, the future governor of Texas, as one of her legislative aides, she pushed through several bills regarding women’s rights, including one that increased the statute of limitations on reporting rape from two to three years, She had served slightly more than two terms when she went to Washington as general counsel of the Department of Agriculture in 1977. From 1978 until 1981, she served as an assistant on women’s issues to President Jimmy Carter. She and Mr. Weddington, who was also a lawyer, set up a law practice in Austin. They divorced in 1974. Her brother, John Ragle, is her sole immediate survivor.