At a source’s request, Mr. Beckwith and his editors held off on publishing until after Jan. 17, 1973, when the Roe decision was scheduled to be announced. The piece was included on page 46 of the issue that would hit newsstands on Jan. 22.
When Chief Justice Warren E. Burger unexpectedly delayed the opinion’s release — possibly so that it would not hang over President Richard M. Nixon’s second inaugural — Mr. Beckwith had the news to himself for a few hours.
“Last week Time learned that the Supreme Court has decided to strike down nearly every anti-abortion law in the land,” he wrote.
He augmented that revelation with a prediction: “No decision in the court’s history, not even those outlawing public school segregation and capital punishment, has evoked the intensity of emotion that will surely follow this ruling.”
David Cameron Beckwith was born on Oct. 30, 1942, in Seattle, the elder of two brothers. His father, Cameron Beckwith, was a typesetter. His mother, Rhode (Bjorge) Beckwith, was a homemaker.
The family moved to Binghamton, N.Y., and later to Lyons Township, Ill., a Chicago suburb, where David graduated from high school. He studied history at Carleton College in Minnesota, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1964, and received a master’s in journalism at Columbia University in 1965. He was a reporter for The Minneapolis Star and The Houston Chronicle before enrolling in law school.
In addition to his wife, a retired teacher and librarian whom he married in 1979, he is survived by two daughters, Fleur and Valeah Beckwith, and two grandchildren.
