Lawyer Sarah Weddington, who won abortion rights in the United States, has died

She was one of the architects of abortion rights in the United States. Lawyer Sarah Weddington, who successfully litigated the Roe v. Wade, died Sunday, December 26, at the age of 76. In 1973, M^me Weddington and fellow lawyer Linda Coffee had filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of a pregnant woman challenging a Texas state law that banned abortions.

“She pleaded 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 his former students, on Twitter. “She was my teacher” and “Opened my eyes to the fragility of my rights and my freedom”, she underlined, specifying that the lawyer had succumbed to “A series of health problems”. This information was confirmed by the family in a letter forwarded to the local newspaper. The Texas Tribune.

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. This, which is not guaranteed by federal law in the United States, has since been based on this jurisprudence: the landmark decision of the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, dating from 1973.

“A house that threatens to take water”

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 was not “Viable”, that is to say until approximately between twenty-two and twenty-four 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 fifty 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, however, assured the 1^er December he “Continued” to support the Roe v. Wade. This historic stop “Looks like a house on the edge of a beach which threatens to take water and collapse”, had already warned M^me Weddington in 1998.