Constance Cook

Constance E. Cook (August 17, 1919 – January 20, 2009) was an American Republican Party politician who served in the New York State Assembly, where she co-authored a bill signed into law that legalized abortion in the state of New York in 1970, three years before the Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1973 legalized the practice nationwide.

Biography

Early life Cook was born on August 17, 1919, as Constance Eberhardt in Shaker Heights, Ohio, to Walter and Catherine Sellmann Eberhardt. She attended Cornell University, receiving her undergraduate degree in 1941, before being awarded a law degree from Cornell Law School in 1943. She was appointed to serve as Cornell's vice president for land grant affairs, making her the first female vice president in Cornell history.

She worked with a Wall Street law firm for five years after graduating from law school, before returning to Ithaca, where she met, and married, her husband. With the switch by Michaels, and Speaker Perry Duryea's yes-vote, the bill passed by a vote of 76 to 73 in the Assembly. Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed the law the next day, and the U.S. Supreme Court patterned its ruling in its landmark January 1973 decision Roe v. Wade on the New York law.

Interviewed after Cook's death, Schiess was quoted by The New York Times as stating that the legal challenge played a major role in driving the Episcopal Church to change its stance, noting that, "Nothing significant would have happened without the attention of Constance Cook."

Quote "I didn't really have a sense at that time that we had done something momentous, though it was long overdue ... ooking back now, it seems like a bigger deal." (Constance Cook on the 1970 New York State abortion bill; as she recounted to the New York Times in April 2000).

Death Constance Cook died at age 89 at her home in Ithaca, New York. Her husband, Alfred, had died in 1998. She was survived by two children, three grandchildren, and a sister.