On an otherwise ordinary morning in the summer of 1970, a divorced and abandoned woman named Pixie went into labor in a Dallas hospital. A self-described “rough woman, born into pain and anger and raised mostly by [herself],” Pixie had spent the last few years as a barker “running the freak show at the Bluegrass Carnival.” Though she was young, Pixie had already lived a tough and troubled life, and now, at age twenty-one, she was the mother of three girls born to three different fathers. Her oldest daughter, Missy, was conceived in an abusive and failed marriage she had entered into at age sixteen. Her second daughter, the fruit of a short-lived fling with a young orderly at Baylor University Hospital, was placed for adoption before she woke from the anesthesia. And the child born that morning, she claimed, was the result of a brutal rape.

Young, scared, and alone, Pixie had initially decided after the rape and resulting pregnancy that she didn’t “want this thing growing inside [her] body” any longer, and, not knowing what the procedure for an abortion was or even what it was called, asked her obstetrician simply to make her “not pregnant.” To Pixie’s dismay, she was told that in Texas it was illegal to perform an abortion that was unnecessary to save her life, and, admittedly, her life was not in danger. Through a series of events that began with a referral to a Dallas adoption attorney, she then ended up at Columbo’s Pizza Parlor seated across from two young, idealistic attorneys searching for a lead plaintiff for a class-action lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Texas’s restrictive abortion law.