‘Jane Roe’ – from abortion rights pioneer to opponent
Ayoung, impoverished woman in Texas was pregnant for the third time. Her first child was being raised by her mother; the second had been given up for adoption at birth; this time she wanted an abortion, but in 1969 the procedure was prohibited by Texas law.
To European sensibilities the pregnant woman’s dilemma would largely be a private one, an issue that she would wrestle with in her own conscience. In the United States it was, and still is, a political and public issue. Even in 2017 many American women, having already made the heart-wrenching decision to terminate their pregnancy, drive across state lines, conceal their identities and live in fear of reprisals if their car number plates are traced. Abortion clinics are fire-bombed and their staff live in fear.
In Texas two young lawyers were seeking a client. Sarah Weddington – who had recently had an abortion of her own just across the border in Mexico at a clinic designed to get around US laws – and Linda Coffee were anxious to change the law. As Coffee said in 1983: ‘‘It had to be a pregnant woman wanting to get an abortion. She couldn’t have the funds to travel to California or New York for a legal abortion. And we had to have someone who could take the publicity.’’ Furthermore, the woman would have to fail to qualify under the Texas law that said abortion was permissible if the mother’s life was in danger.
The case became known as Roe v Wade. Norma McCorvey was the anonymised Jane Roe (the usual appellation of Jane Doe already being used in another case being heard at the same time). Wade was Henry Wade, the conservative district attorney for Dallas County, Texas, who in 1964 had led the prosecution case against Jack Ruby, the murderer of Lee Harvey Oswald who had been arrested for the assassination of President Kennedy the previous year.
After several years of legal wrangling the US Supreme Court ruled in January 1973 that women had the right to abortion ‘‘free of interference by the state’’, paving the way for an estimated 58 million abortions since then, pitting liberals and conservatives against each other and leaving McCorvey as a pawn to be exploited by both sides.
She was born Norma Leah Nelson in Simmesport, Louisiana, in September 1947, of part-Cajun, part-Cherokee Indian descent. Short and slightly built, she was nicknamed Pixie by her friends.
Like much of her life, Norma’s childhood was a sad and messy one. According to her own telling her grandmother was a prostitute and fortune teller while her mother, Mary, an alcoholic, was physically abusive. In 2010 Mary admitted to Vanity Fair magazine: ‘‘I beat the f... out of her.’’
Her father, Olin, was a TV repairman and Jehovah’s Witness minister; before her teens Norma had denounced him in church for preaching against the evils of smoking and drinking while keeping cigarettes in his pocket and a bottle in the sideboard.
By the time she was 13 Olin was off the scene. Meanwhile, at age 10 Norma had stolen cash from the petrol station where she was working and run away to Oklahoma City with a friend. She was sexually assaulted at school by a nun and at home by a male relative.
She ended up in a reform school, dropping out of education aged 15 after ninth grade and, within a year, marrying Elwood ‘‘Woody’’ McCorvey, a 21-year-old itinerant sheet-metal worker who, she claimed, beat her. They were soon divorced, but she was already pregnant and their daughter, Melissa, was born in May, 1965.
Norma signed over legal custody to her mother, although she later claimed that Mary had tricked her when she was drunk. ‘‘I know I’m not the world’s brightest,’’ she once said with a degree of understatement.
She was not a worrier about work and the next few years involved a combination of odd jobs punctuated with drink, drugs, homelessness and deadbeat lovers of both sexes. ‘‘I only ever slept with four or five men, but I got pregnant with three of them,’’ she said. ‘‘With women it wasn’t so easy to get pregnant.’’
By 1969 she was working at a circus that exhibited freak animals and was pregnant for a third time. A doctor referred her to Coffee and Weddington. McCorvey later claimed that she signed an affidavit that she had not read; all she wanted was a quick abortion.
She even claimed that the pregnancy had come about after being gang-raped by members of a travelling circus, although in 1987 she admitted that was false. The case, in which she was never called to testify, later became a class-action suit, ensuring that any ruling would apply to all women in Texas.
By the time Justice Harry A Blackmun delivered the Supreme Court’s 7-2 ruling on January 22, 1973, it was too late for McCorvey. Her third child, a girl, had been born in 1970 and, like her second, was given up for adoption. She learnt of the outcome in a newspaper. McCorvey, who preferred to be known as Miss Norma, waived her anonymity and found herself thrown into the world’s spotlight, a heroine to many, a baby killer to others.
While the case was being heard McCorvey was caught shoplifting by Connie Gonzalez, a store worker. They were soon a couple, cleaning apartments, smoking marijuana and enjoying a busy social life. Within a decade McCorvey was volunteering at the Aaron Women’s Health Center in Dallas, while occasionally speaking to the media.
After being shot at in her home in Dallas in 1989 she had a steel front door installed and moved to North Carolina for a year, but notoriety followed her.
‘‘I go shopping to Tom Thumb [grocery store] and I am accosted by anti-choice people,’’ McCorvey told the New York Times in 1994, after a TV film about Roe v Wade starring Holly Hunter was released, for which she received occasional royalties. ‘‘Men come up to me in frozen foods and say, ’You’re responsible for babies being killed,’ ’’
The Supreme Court came close to reversing Roe v Wade when Ronald Reagan was president, while one of President George W Bush’s first acts was to deny US aid to countries that permit abortions. Last month President Trump signed an executive action blocking government funding to organisations that perform or promote abortions as part of their family planning services.
For many years McCorvey stood by the abortion cause, working in clinics reassuring young women that they were not killing a foetus, just bringing on a missed period. She made some money by appearing at ‘‘prochoice’’ events and on one occasion appeared at an abortionrights rally in Washington DC with Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda and Glenn Close. Women’s centres and foundations were established in the name of her alter ego, Jane Roe.
She also told of trying to rebuild her relationship with her mother, ‘‘but she’d call here and say, ‘You filthy lesbian, what are you doing with those aborted foetuses at those clinics you work at?’ ’’
In 1995 Operation Rescue, one of America’s most radical antiabortion organisations, moved into the building next door to the clinic where she was working. Within a year McCorvey had become a born-again Christian, repudiating the cause to which she had given her name and her life’s work.
Now declaring her 21-year lesbian relationship to be platonic, she was baptised in a Dallas swimming pool by the Rev Flip Benham, a fundamentalist preacher. Some suggested that she had not been receiving the attention she sought within the ‘‘pro-choice’’ campaign, even that her conversion was little more than a well-paid career move.
She had written I am Roe with Andy Meisler in 1994. Now came Won by Love (1997, with Gary Thomas), a different take on her life. By 1998 she had converted to Roman Catholicism and was regularly travelling overseas as a prolife speaker and campaigner, always accompanied by Gonzalez. Yet before long she was back to chain-smoking, heavy drinking, bouts of depression and living on handouts.
McCorvey, who never had an abortion, was something of an accidental activist, although a totemic figure to campaigners on both sides of the debate. Depending on your point of view she had either ushered in a new era of equality in which women were in control of their bodies, or she had facilitated a form of infanticide on a scale unprecedented since Herod ordered the slaughter of the innocents.
More dispassionate observers saw this weak and suggestible woman as a mass of contradictions who was easily manipulated – by the men she slept with, by the lawyers seeking to change the world, by the abortion clinics she worked for, and by the churches and ‘‘pro-life’’ organisations she subsequently championed.
‘‘I wasn’t the wrong person to become Jane Roe,’’ she once said. ‘‘I wasn’t the right person to become Jane Roe. I was just the person who became Jane Roe, of Roe v Wade. And my life story, warts and all, was a little piece of history.’’ — The Times