MINEOLA — Changing the course of abortion law history in America began with a $15 filing fee in Dallas.
Lawyer Linda Coffee wrote the check on March 3, 1970 to file docket number CA-3-3690-B in a case named Roe vs Wade in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
Coffee is now 78 and living in Mineola, where she is retired and closely monitors the recent legal challenges to Roe vs. Wade from the one-bedroom home she shares with her partner of 38 years, Rebecca Hartt.
This month, the Supreme Court let stand the Texas law known as Senate Bill 8, which allows citizens to sue anyone who aids and abets an abortion after around six weeks, while challenges move forward. And a ruling is awaited on a Mississippi law which bans abortions at 15 weeks. Once considered unassailable legal precedent, the Roe ruling is now facing its most serious threat in decades.
Coffee keeps the original receipts from the filing fees as treasured mementoes of the landmark case that ultimately legalized abortion nationwide.
“It’s hard to believe that $15 changed history so much, best $15 ever spent, Linda paid for it herself,” Hartt said, pointing to the laminated filing receipt for Roe vs. Wade.
Mineola is about 80 miles east of Dallas. It’s a small railroad town known for being the hometown of country music star Kacey Musgraves and Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the author of SB 8, the law that banned abortion after six weeks in the state.
Mineola is also now home to Coffee, who in the early 1970s sought out a pregnant woman in order to start the case that became Roe vs. Wade, which Hughes and other SB 8 proponents want to overturn.
Born on Christmas in Houston, but raised in Dallas, Coffee attended Woodrow Wilson High School and traveled to New Zealand for her junior year of high school.
Coffee graduated from the University of Texas Law School. Following her graduation, Coffee clerked for the first female federal judge in the state, Sarah T. Hughes, who is famously photographed aboard Air Force One administering the oath of office to Pres. Lyndon B Johnson following the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
Following her clerkship with Hughes, Coffee applied for a job at the Dallas County district attorney’s office. Female Dallas lawyers had a hard time finding work, Coffee recounts, so she went there looking for trial experience.
“I wanted to be able to do trial work and not just to just be a researcher,” she told The Dallas Morning News.
Henry Wade was the district attorney in Dallas from 1951 to 1987, known earliest for prosecuting Jack Ruby for his assassination attempt of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who murdered Kennedy as he was driven through the Dealey Plaza in downtown. Today, Wade is better known for his involvement in the Roe case — a case Coffee would later help take to the Supreme Court.
“I was encouraged that he would consider hiring a woman,” Coffee said. “He said he thought that I would have credibility with the jury and I wasn’t sure about that.”
Wade never hired Coffee.
Wade was tough on crime and wanted to clean up Harry Hines Boulevard, an area known then and now for a heavy street drug culture and prostitution.
“He wasn’t really against abortion except for there were a lot of prostitutes for a while that he kind of cleaned up,” Coffee said.
Before Roe
Following her clerk stint with Hughes, Coffee said she began working at the Dallas law firm of Palmer & Palmer, but was interested in abortion rights. She got connected with the Women’s Alliance at First Unitarian Church of Dallas, but none of the woman organizing here were preganant and it became clear to her that in order to challenge abortion laws in Texas, she would need a woman seeking an abortion.
In preparing for the case, Coffee connected with another UT Law graduate who was working for abortion access in Austin, Sarah Weddington.
“Would you consider being co-counsel in the event that a suit is actually filed. I have always found that it is a great deal more fun to work with someone on a law suit of this nature,” Coffee wrote to Weddington in a letter Dec. 4, 1969.
“I have check the matter with our law firm and they have no objection to my bringing the suit. I will be looking forward to hearing from you soon,” Coffee writes.
Weddington would go on to join Coffee in the suit.
On March 3, 1970, Coffee actually filed two cases in the U.S. Northern District Court of Texas — Doe vs. Wade and Roe vs. Wade. The cases were filed in Judge Hughes court, the same judge Coffee had clerked for after law school.
Coffee explained the plaintiffs in the Doe vs. Wade case were a married couple from Atlanta who wanted to challenge the abortion laws in Texas.
“They were David and Marsha King, they were a married couple that were well educated,” she said.
A friend from church, Henry McCluskey, knew that Coffee was looking for a woman to start a case. McCluskey also knew a 21-year-old woman named Norma McCorvey, who was pregnant with her third pregnancy, who would later be known by her pseudonym, Jane Roe.
The cases were consolidated on April 14, 1970 by Judge Hughes.
In her book I Am Roe: My Life, Roe v Wade, and Freedom of Choice, McCorvey asserts that she told both Coffee and Weddington that she did not want to be called Jane Doe and that was where the name “Roe” originated from.
But Coffee says the real reason they named her case Jane Roe was because the pseudonym Doe was already part of the other case.
Roe vs. Wade
In 1970, Coffee and Weddington argued Roe vs. Wade at the Northern district court before a three-judge panel, Hughes, William McLaughlin Taylor Jr., and Irving Loeb Goldberg.
Coffee and Weddington each argued for 30 minutes at the district court.
“Judge Hughes and Judge Goldberg asked most of the questions. Judge Taylor, I don’t think he asked a single question,” Coffee said.
The judges agreed with Coffee and Weddington.
On Dec. 13, 1971, Weddington argued the case before the Supreme Court. Coffee was there that day.
Coffee displays her Supreme Court quill pen in her living room in Mineola, a memento given to all lawyers who argue before the panel as part of a tradition dating back to the earliest days of the Court.
“No one knew where the women’s restrooms were, they weren’t on the same floor, they were maybe two floors below where the arguments were,” Coffee remembers.
As Coffee and Weddington entered the courtroom, someone remarked that many of the wives of the all male court were in the audience.
“Some of the other people that were interested, some of them were men and some are women, but they all noticed that the there were a number of wives of the Supreme Court justices that were present for the hearing and I wouldn’t recognize any of the wives unless I saw their names appearing just the same as they were married to someone,” she said.
Their presence, she explained, was an indicator of the trajectory of the case in the high court.
“People that knew what was important to the justices would recognize that it emphasized that the court, at least some of the judges, really thought that it was an important case,” she said.
Life after Roe
As history goes, Roe vs. Wade was decided on Jan. 22, 1973, from a 7-2 majority and Coffee slid into the background as divisions flowed through the country over a case she found and started with a $15 dollar filing fee.
Since the case was decided, the U.S. has enacted 1,336 abortion restrictions. However, It is estimated that there have been over 62 million legal abortions preformed since the 1973 decision. Texas enacted the most restrictive law in the nation on Sept. 1, banning abortions after approximately six weeks of gestation or when a fetal cardiac activitiy is detected.
Coffee spent the rest of her career working in bankruptcy law, practicing some civil rights cases on the side.
She fell in love with Hartt after answering a personal ad in a newspaper. They’ve been together since 1983.
Neither Coffee nor Hartt have not been spared by illness or tragedy throughout the years. Hartt survived breast cancer and Coffee, the West Nile virus, a stroke, and a hit-and-run as she walked her dogs.
Of her career and retirement, Coffee said, “I think a lot of the early women who did things in the Dallas area, many of them were discounted because they were women.”
Roe Today
On Dec. 1, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Dobbs vs. Mississippi, a case that has the potential to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Coffee watched the case, not from the courtroom as she did in 1971, but this time from her one-bedroom house.
“I’m really disappointed in what looks like there may be five justices on the Supreme Court now that are ready to either substantially limit or radically change Roe vs. Wade,” she said.
Notably, there are now three female Supreme Court Justices on the bench.
“I think lately they’ve been trying to focus on if they can show how much pain the fetus feels,” Coffee said.
Coffee says she may be open to changing her position on abortion regulations if it could be proven that a fetus feels pain.
“I don’t know why there hasn’t been more progress in some ways, maybe to determine whether or not the fetus can really feel pain,” she said.
Beyond that, Coffee does not see a need for restrictions on abortion.
“I really think that most women probably know what they want to do,” she said.
Coffee and Hartt shuffled through their catalog of primary documents with original signatures from characters such as McCorvey and Weddington, filing receipts, summary judgments, and briefs.
Asked if she considered herself a historical figure, Coffee replied: “I don’t think so,” she said.
