Roe Plaintiff Restates the Case She Helped Win
After Marsha and David King finished law school in Georgia in 1976 and 1977 respectively and established themselves on a solid financial footing, they started the family that they wanted.
Today, every available surface of their living room is jammed with family photos.
"When we did have children, it was incredible; it was wonderful. We were two dedicated parents; we needed every asset we had," said Marsha King, whose two daughters are now grown.
King and her husband helped make legal history in 1973 as anonymous plaintiffs--Mr. and Mrs. John Doe--in Roe v. Wade, the case in which the U.S. Supreme Court recognized for the first time that women had a constitutional right to decide whether to continue a pregnancy prior to viability and that states could not unilaterally make all abortions illegal.
The names of Marsha and her husband David were never made public and appeared only in a letter contained in archival documents deposited at a Connecticut college by a New York lawyer who offered assistance on the case. Few people today are aware that the Kings were two of the three plaintiffs who sued the state of Texas over its restrictions on abortion.
This past summer Marsha King agreed to an exclusive interview with Women's eNews, after Operation Save America--a Dallas-based anti-choice group that has been aligned in recent years with a more famous plaintiff in the case, Norma McCorvey--mounted protests in July in Atlanta, where King now lives. (Operation Save America was formerly known as Operation Rescue.)
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Today, every available surface of their living room is jammed with family photos.
"When we did have children, it was incredible; it was wonderful. We were two dedicated parents; we needed every asset we had," said Marsha King, whose two daughters are now grown.
King and her husband helped make legal history in 1973 as anonymous plaintiffs--Mr. and Mrs. John Doe--in Roe v. Wade, the case in which the U.S. Supreme Court recognized for the first time that women had a constitutional right to decide whether to continue a pregnancy prior to viability and that states could not unilaterally make all abortions illegal.
The names of Marsha and her husband David were never made public and appeared only in a letter contained in archival documents deposited at a Connecticut college by a New York lawyer who offered assistance on the case. Few people today are aware that the Kings were two of the three plaintiffs who sued the state of Texas over its restrictions on abortion.
This past summer Marsha King agreed to an exclusive interview with Women's eNews, after Operation Save America--a Dallas-based anti-choice group that has been aligned in recent years with a more famous plaintiff in the case, Norma McCorvey--mounted protests in July in Atlanta, where King now lives. (Operation Save America was formerly known as Operation Rescue.)