An accidental activist
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.
In Texas, two young lawyers were seeking a client. Sarah Weddington 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.’’
The case became known as Roe v Wade. Norma McCorvey was the anonymised Jane Roe. Wade was Henry Wade, the conservative district attorney for Dallas County, Texas. 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.
She was born Norma Leah Nelson in Simmesport, Louisiana, in September 1947, of part-Cajun, part-Cherokee Indian descent.
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.
Her father, Olin, was a TV repairman and Jehovah’s Witness minister. 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. 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 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.
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.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 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 found herself thrown into the world’s spotlight.
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. ‘‘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 made some money by appearing at ‘‘pro-choice’’ events and on one occasion appeared at an abortionrights rally in Washington DC with Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda and Glenn Close.
In 1995, Operation Rescue, one of America’s most radical anti- abortion 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.
By 1998, she had converted to Roman Catholicism and was regularly travelling overseas as a prolife speaker and campaigner.
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.
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
‘‘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