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THEIR lawyers believe such a case could provide the court with one of several means to undermine another Texas reproductive rights case, Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 decision that guaranteed a right to abortion. In that case, the justices explicitly avoided speculating on when life begins, but asserted that the unborn are not "persons" as encompassed by the 14th Amendment. Absolved of the need to balance the rights of the unborn against those of a pregnant woman, the court found that a woman's right to privacy allowed her to terminate a pregnancy.
However, the Roe decision came five years before the birth of the first test-tube baby. Socially conservative legal theorists, buoyed by the court's recent decision to uphold a ban on the midterm abortion procedure known as intact dilation and extraction, which opponents call "partial-birth abortion," believe a case involving frozen embryos could give an increasingly conservative court one vehicle for reconsidering the rights of the unborn, and to do so apart from the issue of a woman's right to control her own body. If their view held, Augusta Roman would gain control over the embryos.
Augusta and her lawyer, Rebecca Reitz, argue that what distinguishes their case from its predecessors is that Augusta has never had children, and has no hope of producing them without the three frozen embryos. An intensive-care nurse who immigrated from Nigeria as a student in 1983, Augusta will be 47 in August.
That is too old for another round of in vitro fertilization, and her fertility doctor has estimated that her chance of getting pregnant with the existing embryos is less than 10% -- and falling. Lawyers on both sides do not expect the Texas Supreme Court to decide whether to hear oral arguments in the case until late this year; a federal appeal would take years more.
A former bodybuilder, Augusta met her future husband at a local gym in 1996. Randy Roman was an aerospace technician who had moved to Texas from Northern California. Both were in their mid-30s and ready to settle down. They shared a desire to start a family and a common Christian faith -- or thought they did.
They married after a brief courtship, and Augusta acceded to her husband's suggestion that they wait two years before trying to have children. They bought a house that came ready-made with a girl's room papered in pink and a boy's room decorated with animal prints. When they did start trying, she got pregnant quickly, but miscarried 10 weeks later. After an additional six months of fruitless attempts, doctors determined that Augusta had a fertility problem, and she began round after round of treatments.
