The most pertinent case I reviewed was 1969’s People v. Belous, in which Dr. Leon P. Belous, a well-respected physician and a supporter of abortion rights, was arrested for actions related to his 35-year history of performing abortions in California. Belous’s attorneys appealed the district court’s support of anti-abortion laws to the state Supreme Court, citing an earlier case, 1964’s Griswold v. Connecticut, which protected a woman’s privacy and argued that personal autonomy in childbearing was hers alone to exercise. On September 5, 1969, to the shock of many people across the country, the California Supreme Court overturned the Belous guilty verdict by a vote of 4–3, asserting that women have privacy, a right to follow their own convictions about reproduction, and liberty in matters related to marriage, family, and sex.
To enable women to make their own decisions concerning their own bodies, and to overturn Texas’s overreaching laws and their burdensome and unnecessary control, my plans had to be precise. This issue of “privacy” struck me as offering the best grounds on which to successfully challenge Texas abortion laws. Many people do not know that neither the U.S. Constitution nor any of the amendments actually protects citizens with a “right to privacy,” verbatim. But any case I made, I knew, would need to center on it.
I first met Norma McCorvey in my law office at Palmer and Palmer Law in late November 1969, after my lifelong friend and fellow attorney, Henry McCluskey, called to say he had an adoption client who preferred an abortion. He knew I had been researching and writing to develop a challenge to Texas’s abortion laws. He also knew that, to have standing, we would need a woman pregnant and not wanting to be. I told Norma about my class-action plan to challenge Texas law, and Henry encouraged her by telling her I had been working for some time to help women in her situation. I explained that representing her, as part of a class of Texas women, would cost her nothing, as I would be working as a pro bono attorney. I explained she would be helping women like herself who were pregnant, but who didn’t want to carry their pregnancy to full term.