Roe-Wade Attorney Takes Heart : Abortion rights: But challenges remain despite election of pro-choice president, says Sarah Weddington, who represented plaintiff in historic legal challenge.

Sarah Weddington, the attorney who argued the Roe vs. Wade abortion rights case before the U.S. Supreme Court 20 years ago, says she can breathe a little easier now that a pro-choice Democrat is president.

“What a difference a president makes,” she said to an audience of about 600 who greeted her with a standing ovation Thursday at the annual Orange County Planned Parenthood luncheon at Le Meridien Hotel.

In town to mark the Orange County chapter’s 28th anniversary and the 20th anniversary of the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision, Weddington said much remains to be done to guarantee basic privacy and reproductive rights for women.

“We still will have challenges this year,” she said, citing several legislative initiatives pending in different states and at the federal level. She said she was especially worried about the Freedom of Choice Act, an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would give every woman in the country the right to make her own decisions about her body.

“Will they (Congress) pass it in the form we want it to pass?” she asked.

Weddington won Roe vs. Wade in 1973 as a 27-year-old lawyer representing a young pregnant woman who challenged the Texas abortion laws.

She also served as a member of the Texas House of Representatives, where she worked to reform the state’s rape statutes, helped pass an equal-credit bill for women and led successful efforts to prevent passage of anti-abortion legislation.

She worked for President Jimmy Carter as an attorney in the Department of Agriculture and co-chaired the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Mid-Decade Conference on Women.

Recalling her Supreme Court experience in detail, down to the goose quill pens left on the court desks as souvenirs, Weddington said: “We were never for abortion, we were for giving women the maximum choice for their own lives.”

She said she thought the rights were guaranteed for good after the case was decided but in the years since has seen those rights threatened by conservative and religious groups. Weddington was often pitted against people from both groups in debates and talk shows.

In her recently published book “A Question of Choice,” she revealed her own abortion, done in 1967, a secret she kept with her then-boyfriend and later husband, Ron Weddington.

The audience of mostly women lined up after the talk to have their copies of Weddington’s book signed.

Anita Mangels of the California Abortion Rights Action League, who helped found Republicans for Clinton, said she found Weddington’s remarks to the point.

“We cannot be complacent the way we have for 20 years,” she said. “It’s a very timely reminder. Abortion is not a single issue. Who makes the most important decision of your life?”