By Sheila G. Miller / The Bulletin  / September 25. 2009

More than 100 Central Oregonians gathered Thursday to hear from Sarah Weddington, who in 1973 successfully argued Roe v. Wade in the U.S. Supreme Court, a landmark decision on abortion rights that is still controversial today.

Weddington was in town as the keynote speaker for Central Oregon’s Planned Parenthood Luncheon. After her turn before the Supreme Court as a 26-year-old lawyer from Texas, Weddington served in the Texas House of Representatives for three terms and worked as an assistant for President Jimmy Carter. Today, she is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

On Thursday, Weddington gave her opinions on why Planned Parenthood and women’s reproductive rights are still important today, 36 years after the landmark decision.

She told of a time before abortion was legal, when most hospitals had infected obstetrics wards for women suffering complications from illegal abortions.

“We don’t have IOB wards anymore, and I’m so glad. It’s because of (Planned Parenthood founder and birth control activist) Margaret Sanger, and it’s because of Roe v. Wade and because of that Supreme Court decision,” Weddington said. “But a decision doesn’t make anything a reality. It’s Planned Parenthood.”

David Greenburg, the president of Planned Parenthood-Columbia Willamette, spoke of the role Bend’s Planned Parenthood clinic has played since opening 11 years ago.

“We’ve served 6,500 men and women per year,” he said, through the clinic’s various reproductive services like vasectomies, birth control, and pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease testing. “In that time, the number of abortions in Deschutes County has actually decreased.”

The clinic will undergo renovations this fall and beginning in January, Greenburg said, patients will visit a spruced-up building.

State Rep. Judy Stiegler, D-Bend, also spoke at the event.

She shared with the crowd the various laws passed during the 2009 state legislative session that seek to protect women’s reproductive health, including a bill requiring public schools to provide comprehensive sex education.

About two dozen anti-abortion protesters picketed at the speech, some with signs that featured graphic photos of aborted fetuses. One abortion protester drove a delivery truck up and down Mt. Washington Drive with large photos plastered on the side.

While the tone of the luncheon was sometimes serious, Weddington laughed as she shared the now-antiquated sexism she experienced in the 1970s. When she went to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue Roe v. Wade, for example, she discovered that the lawyer’s lounge had no women’s bathroom. She had to go to the basement in order to freshen up before her oral argument.

And she told of interviewing at a large Texas firm before Roe v. Wade, where she was told the partners didn’t feel comfortable “cussing out” a woman or having her work long hours when she should have been home making dinner for her family.

“I didn’t get the job, but I probably should have thanked (the firm),” she said. “If I did, I would be doing bankruptcies today.”

What she’s done instead, she feels, is more important. When she received a call from a New York Times reporter in 1973 asking for a comment on the decision, she told the audience, “My comment was ‘Yay! Women will get to make their own decisions now.’”

Sheila G. Miller can be reached at 541-617-7831 or at smiller@bendbulletin.com.