The woman at the centre of a landmark abortion ruling
Norma Mccorvey 1947-2017
Norma Mccorvey, who has died aged 69, was better known to the world as Jane Roe, the plaintiff in “one of the most contested decisions in US legal history”, said The Daily Telegraph. The verdict of the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade (Wade was the name of the local district attorney) effectively legalised abortion in most of America’s 50 states – a move hailed as a milestone in women’s rights. Mccorvey duly became a “poster girl” for the pro-choice movement. Or at least she did until 1995, when in a sensational about-turn she declared that she’d found God, and began fiercely campaigning for Christian pro-life organisations.
Born in Louisiana in 1947, Mccorvey had a difficult childhood, said The New York Times. Her mother was an alcoholic and her father, a TV repairman, left when she was a girl. At 16, she married a man who beat her before and after the birth of their daughter, Melissa. Mccorvey gave her mother custody of the child, and within a few years was single and living on the streets in Dallas, Texas, struggling with drink and drugs, and taking lovers of both sexes. She gave up another child for adoption, then fell pregnant again at the age of 21. At first she claimed to have been raped – which under Texas’ restrictive abortion law would have allowed her to have an abortion – but later admitted lying. Her case was taken up by the lawyers Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, who had been searching for a plaintiff to challenge the Texan law. The process took three years, by which time Mccorvey, who was never called to testify, had given up her third child for adoption. She learned of the verdict in the newspapers and later complained that her lawyers had exploited her, withholding information about how she might gain access to an abortion because they needed her pregnant for the trial to proceed.
Mccorvey went on to work as a counsellor at several Dallas abortion clinics before becoming a born-again Christian. Having been baptised by the evangelical minister Flip Benham, an antiabortion campaigner, she announced that she was “dedicated to spending the rest of my life undoing the law that bears my name”. Yet according to her former attorney Weddington, she was a deeply troubled person who “craved and sought attention”. Even Pastor Benham publicly criticised her as someone who “just fishes for money”. Mccorvey’s private motivations remained hard to unravel, said The Washington Post, and perhaps the most generous interpretation of her life would be to cast her as a victim. As she herself once said: “I wasn’t the wrong person to become Jane Roe, I wasn’t the right person to become Jane Roe. I was just the person who became Jane Roe.”