People: In 1969 she found that she had conceived yet again; the father, she says, was a man she had dated just four months.

This pregnancy, however, would not be like the others. She had given up two children already, and no one, least of all Norma, wanted this baby. Sitting in a gynecologist’s office, she told two other women she really wanted an abortion. “They were shocked,” she says. “But one said, ‘Just tell the doctor you were raped.’ I thought that was a good idea.” The gynecologist turned her away, but friends steered the frightened, furious Norma to an illicit abortion mill. “I was afraid of an illegal abortion,” she says. “I had heard horror stories. [Still] I would have gone through with it. But nobody was there. They’d already been busted.”

With no money to travel to a state where abortion was then legal, Norma consulted a lawyer who she hoped would help her find a home for the baby she would now have to bear. As it happened, Dallas attorney Henry McCluskey knew Weddington and Coffee, who were looking for a woman willing to serve as a plaintiff in a pro-choice case.

The three met at a pizza parlor when Norma was eight weeks pregnant. Told that any legal decision would come too late to allow her to end her own pregnancy, she was disappointed: “I felt selfish, because I really wanted an abortion,” she says. “Sarah asked, ‘Would you be willing to take your case to the Supreme Court?’ I didn’t understand all legal aspects, but I said, ‘Yeah, let’s go for it.’ ” Norma’s third baby was born in June 1970; she immediately signed adoption papers. She held the child only briefly, when a nurse mistakenly brought it into her hospital room. The nurse quickly snatched the infant back, leaving Norma in tears.