As the Supreme Court made its decision last week to overturn Roe v. Wade, sparking protests and praise from Americans on both sides of the political spectrum and everyone began questioning what is next to get the ax from the Supreme Court - Contraceptives, Gay Rights, Transgender Rights, Educational Equality, Title IX, Biracial Marriages - and the list goes on, as many wonder if, in the step backwards they fear this country is heading back toward the era of Jim Crow.
Fifteen states stood ready to pass their own laws once the decision was finalized, with several more proposing new laws in the coming weeks.
Arguably, the right for a woman to seek an abortion under the statute inherent in Roe v Wade has now been thrown back into the states. I had a friend say, "Wasn't leaving a major question (slavery) up to the states is what led to Civil War?" In one case, he could be correct in that assumption.
Much has been written in the past 50 years regarding Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision that embedded the right for a woman to have an abortion into federal law. Many states have looked for ways to circumvent the decision and have passed laws regarding when an abortion can occur. In the nearly five decades since the 1973 ruling, its basic principle was repeatedly affirmed and reaffirmed, even as the high court approved restrictions that include the 1976 “Hyde Amendment " against federal funding for most abortions and a 2003 ban on controversial "partial-birth" abortions.
Since 1973, many have heard mention of the woman at the heart of the case, Jane Roe, an unmarried pregnant woman in Texas who dared to challenge the state laws regulating abortions, eventually taking the case to the Supreme Court.
Yet, few know or remember the other person at the heart of the case.
They called him The Chief.
He stalked the halls of Dallas courthouses chewing a cigar.
In his office, he sometimes spat.
His name was Henry Wade.
To Texans, he was unforgettable. As Dallas County prosecutor from 1950 to 1986, Wade never lost a case he personally tried. His office racked up convictions - some, it later turned out, falsely - at the pace of a prize thoroughbred. He prosecuted Jack Ruby after he shot and killed President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in the Dallas police headquarters in 1963.
And yet to the rest of the country, Wade is largely forgotten, a fact that boggles the mind given that his name is attached to perhaps the most controversial Supreme Court decision in United States history.
Roe v. Wade
Wade’s name was all over the headlines last week as the Supreme Court overturned its 1973, ruling, and with it the constitutional right to abortion.
The public debate about the decision to legalize abortion has extended way beyond the participants and facts of the case. You do not, for instance, hear Norma McCorvey’s name all that much in the shouting. She is the woman who sued Wade as “Jane Roe,” in the case that wound its way to the Supreme Court.
You definitely do not hear much, if anything at all, about Wade, which is another mind-boggler because he was the losing party in a landmark case.
And he mostly shrugged his shoulders at the whole thing.
Wade was born in 1914, the ninth of 11 children, to small-town east Texas farmers. This is said about many great lawyers: As children, they liked to argue. This was true of Henry Wade, but also the majority of his siblings, five of whom also became lawyers.
He studied law at University of Texas, joined the Navy, became an FBI agent and in 1950 was elected Dallas County prosecutor, a job he held down without challenge for 36 years.
Wade’s obituaries and stories about his death in 2001 noted that, in addition to chewing cigars, he liked to play dominoes. Also, when he returned to private practice late in life, he often left the office by 4 p.m. so he could go home to watch his favorite television show, “Bonanza.”
You could say he was a character. And a consequential one, at that.
Guardian, in its obituary, put it this way in the very first sentence: “The lawyer who precipitated one of the most controversial judicial decisions in American history …”
But that would have been a point of contention with The Chief.
When “Roe,” a resident of Dallas County, served Wade with court papers in 1970, it was not because he had personally wronged her.
According to Roe v. Wade: The Untold Story of the Landmark Supreme Court Decision That Made Abortion Legal, the cigar-chewing prosecutor - a Democrat - never showed any personal animosity toward abortion. In fact, author Marian Faux wrote: "…Wade’s office, like most district attorneys’ offices across the country, had instigated virtually no abortion prosecutions. District attorneys typically prosecuted an abortionist only when a complaint was filed by a police department, and that only happened when a woman showed up, usually at a large metropolitan hospital, with a badly bungled abortion and was willing to talk to the police about what had happened to her."
Which is to say, Wade was not out crusading against abortions.
So why did “Roe” sue?
Because abortion was illegal in the county where Wade was the top law enforcement official. Roe wanted to challenge the law and his authority, should he choose to exercise it, to prosecute her if she underwent an abortion.
The result is well known: Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 in Roe’s favor. Roe won! Abortion was declared legal around the country. Wade lost!
But had he?
In his history of abortion and the right to privacy, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David J. Garrow wrote that after the decision was announced, Wade “made no comments to the press” about a case he “had never taken any personal interest in,” despite the fact that it “bore his name.” He did privately acknowledge later in life that “in some cases abortion is justified,” according to Garrow.
A keen legal analysis of the case by Wade would have been impossible.
The Chief never read the decision.
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