It's horrible - but not shocking. The Left has always been about lies and it's usually women and children who suffer the most as a result of their lies.
Women's rights leader faces breast cancer battle
By Natalie Gott / Associated Press
http://www.detnews.com/2001/nation/0112/26/a10-375765.htm
AUSTIN, Texas -- Sarah Weddington spent years fighting for women's rights. Today she is focused on a new cause: her own life.
The 56-year-old attorney who at age 26 argued the U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized abortion is battling breast cancer, the most common form of cancer among women. In typical Weddington fashion, she is facing the challenge head-on. She makes breast cancer a familiar topic in her speeches. She named her tumor Darth Vader and has peered through a microscope to study the cancer cells that plague her.
"If you're going to go through something bad, you might as well make it as good as you can," Weddington said. Her doctor has given her a positive prognosis, but battling the disease is tough. Diagnosed in April, Weddington underwent chemotherapy once a week from June through November. She started radiation treatment this month. On a recent weekly doctor's visit, Weddington was upbeat as she recalled arguing Roe vs. Wade before the Supreme Court, her days in the Carter administration and her life. Raised in Abilene, Weddington earned an English and secondary education degree from McMurry University. She told the dean she wanted to go to law school.
"Well, you can't," he told her.
"And I said, 'I have good grades,' and he said, 'No woman from here has ever gone to law school. It would be too tough,' " she recalled.
After graduating from the University of Texas School of Law in August 1967, she couldn't find a job with a firm. "It was just too early for women," she said.
Instead, she took a job assisting one of her law professors with his work for the American Bar Association. In the fall of 1969, some University of Texas graduate students with whom Weddington had been meeting to discuss women's issues approached her, asking if they would be prosecuted for giving people information about getting safe abortions.
She didn't know the answer, but the woman who had an abortion at age 21 in Mexico began to do some research.
"I knew what it was to go to back alleys and how scary that was, and I wanted other people not to go there," Weddington said.
One of the graduate students said she wanted to file a lawsuit challenging Texas' anti-abortion law. Weddington, at first hesitant, asked former classmate Linda Coffee to help with the case.
Their search for a pregnant woman who wanted an abortion led them to Norma McCorvey, who adopted the pseudonym Jane Roe. McCorvey said that while other women at the time were "head over heels with Gloria Steinem," she idolized Weddington.
"She was everything that I always wanted to be," McCorvey said recently. "I wanted to be smart like her." McCorvey, who in 1995 shocked the abortion rights community by joining the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, says she is not bitter about her role in the case and is praying for Weddington. Weddington says she no longer speaks to McCorvey.
Weddington, Coffee and others assembled the case, but it was Weddington who argued before the Supreme Court in 1971 and again in 1972.
"Now, the women who came to me did not say, 'Would you mind doing a U.S. Supreme Court case?' And if they had, I probably would have said, I can't do that,' " Weddington said.
She offers only faint memories of arguing the case because at the time she was so focused on remembering everything she wanted to say to appeal to each of the judges. Her legal arguments included the idea that women should be allowed to decide whether to continue or terminate pregnancies because of the tremendous effect on them.
"When I left, I actually had to say to people, 'What did I say?' What did they ask?' " she said.
Months later, as Weddington was serving her first term as a Texas state representative in January 1973, her office received a call with the news that she had won.
Then came a telegram -- collect -- from the Supreme Court. "If you had said to me then that I would still be talking about it 29 years later, I would never have believed you," she said.
The win propelled her further into the national spotlight, but she continued to serve as a legislator, sponsoring a bill that made it unlawful to deny credit or loans on the basis of sex and later teaming with state Rep. Kay Bailey Hutchinson -- now a U.S. senator -- to pass rape reform laws.
Weddington later became general counsel for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and in 1978 became an assistant to President Jimmy Carter, advising him on women's issues in what she describes as the most exciting job of her career.
She returned to Austin from Washington in the early 1980s to help care for her younger sister, Sue, who had breast cancer. Sue died in September 1984.
"Because she had breast cancer, I thought I would have something else," Weddington said. "I just never considered I would have breast cancer."
Weddington continued practicing law until nearly four years ago, after the 25th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. She wanted to spend more time writing and giving speeches. She also teaches gender discrimination and leadership classes at the University of Texas.
Former Gov. Ann Richards first met Weddington during the Austin attorney's campaign that made her the first female from Travis County elected to the Texas Legislature. "I was so taken with her and so impressed with her composure, with her maturity," Richards said. "She was certain of herself. You knew that you were dealing with someone who was very smart, who had a lot of self-confidence and who was willing to take risks."
At the doctor's office, Weddington bemoaned the loss of her hair, but laughed as another patient talked about looking like a burglar with a bandana covering her bald head. That patient and her two visitors whispered and nudged each other when they realized they were chatting with Weddington. One later peppered her with questions about the famous case and Texas politics.
Weddington answered graciously, even as a tired look crossed her face when the chemotherapy began to take effect.
"Everybody thinks their life is a progression," Weddington said. "So when you've done a Supreme Court case when you're in your 20s, what do you do for your 30s, 40s and 50s?"
"Brag about it," suggested one worker in the clinic.
Weddington says she's proud to be known as the attorney who won the case legalizing abortion, but she is always looking for another way to leave her mark. To that end, she is participating in a study that compares chemotherapy treatments to see which works best. She has written columns about her fight against cancer for the Austin American-Statesman newspaper. And, she has collected several notebooks of e-mails, cards and other symbols of encouragement from friends and strangers.