Glenn Beck wins collection of artifacts from Roe v. wade up for auction

conservative radio host glenn beck shelled out $600,000 this week to buy a file of Roe v. Wade that Linda Coffee, one of the last living members of the team that defended the landmark abortion case before the Supreme Court in 1973, put up for auction.

Coffee’s partner, Rebecca Hartt, had expressed hope that the collection would be preserved for the historical record after the Supreme Court overturned Roe’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson last summer.

“(L)collection needs to be passed to the next generation, because you won’t have a case like this again,” Hartt said recently. told D magazine, a Dallas publication. “We don’t know who will end up acquiring it, but hopefully it will motivate some people to go into law, politics or whatever, because it needs to be challenged.”

Beck plans to debut the collection this summer at the “American Journey Experience,” the Texas museum that opened in 2020 to house curiosities like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wheelchair, letters from George Washington, and other bits of American history.

It will be surrounded by “additional historical context,” Beck said, stating that the Coffee documents would be “at home” along with his “German eugenics” artifacts. Beck suggested that the abortion rights movement had its roots in the racist eugenics movement because of the beliefs held by Family planning founder Margaret Sanger, whom the organization has denounced for a long time. The practice of abortion, of course, long predates the rise of eugenics.

The radio host read a rambling press release on his show on Friday.

“The cafe and many who were upset by Roe’s ouster in June took a second hit this week,” Beck announced. “In a move likely to anger leftists, including terrorists, the Justice Department has proven unable or unwilling to hold accountable, nationally syndicated radio host and Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck acquired the collection. , sealing the deal on March 6.”

“Roe v. Wade is history, and now that history is in the hands of a pro-life conservative,” he said. Beck noted that while the price was high, he and his wife believed that “the real price of these documents was the lives of at least 60 million children.”

Some 150 pages of documents are included in the file, which Coffee and Hartt said they began collecting after Coffee nearly died from West Nile virus in 2020.

Included is the letter Coffee wrote to convince attorney Sarah Weddington to join the case, the pens she received for defending a Supreme Court case, and the original affidavit signed by Norma McCorvey, the woman behind the name “Jane Roe” who was prevented by Texas law from having an abortion. McCorvey died in 2017, and Weddington died in 2021.