‘Roe’ in landmark case later opposed abortion
DALLAS — Norma McCorvey, whose legal challenge under the pseudonym “Jane Roe” led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision that legalized abortion but who later became an opponent of the procedure, died Saturday in Katy, Texas. She was 69.
McCorvey died at an assisted living center, said journalist Joshua Prager, who is working on a book about McCorvey and was with her and her family when she died. He said she died of heart failure.
McCorvey was 22, unmarried, unemployed and pregnant for the third time when in 1969 she sought to have an abortion in Texas, where the procedure was illegal except to save a woman’s life. The subsequent lawsuit, known as Roe v. Wade, led to the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling that established abortion rights, though by that time, McCorvey had given birth and given her daughter up for adoption.
On Jan. 22, 1973, the Supreme Court handed down its 7-2 ruling, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, articulating a constitutional right to privacy that included the choice to terminate a pregnancy. The ruling established the trimester framework, designed to balance a woman’s right to control her body and a state’s compelling interest in protecting unborn life. Although later modified, it was a landmark of American jurisprudence and made Jane Roe a figurehead — championed or reviled — in the battle over reproductive rights that continues.
McCorvey shed her courtroom pseudonym in the 1980s, lending her name first to supporters of abortion rights and then to the cause’s fiercest critics as a born-again Christian. But even after two memoirs, she remained an enigma.
According to the most sympathetic tellings of her story, she was a victim of abuse, financial hardship, drug and alcohol addiction, and personal frailty.
Harsher judgments presented McCorvey as a user who trolled for attention and cash. Abortion rights activists questioned her motives when McCorvey decamped in 1994, after years as a poster child for their cause, and was baptized by the evangelical minister at the helm of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.
By her own description, she was “a simple woman with a ninth-grade education.” She presented herself as the victim of her attorneys, Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, whom she accused of exploiting the predicament of her unwanted pregnancy to score a victory for the abortion rights cause.
Roe v. Wade, which became a class-action suit, was a watershed for women in general but irrelevant for McCorvey in particular. After an initial court victory for her, Texas mounted an appeal that dragged on past McCorvey’s due date.
By the time the Supreme Court announced its decision, her baby was 21⁄2 years old. She had given the child up for adoption and learned of the ruling in a newspaper article.
Norma Nelson was born Sept. 22, 1947, in Simmesport, La. Her father, a television repairman, was largely absent from her life. She grew up in Houston, Dallas and in the northern Texas town of Gainesville, spending part of her adolescence in a Catholic boarding school and at a reform school for delinquents. Her mother told Prager that she beat her daughter in fits of rage over the “wild” behavior that included sexual promiscuity with men and women.
In her teens, Norma began a short-lived marriage to a sheet-metal worker, Elwood “Woody” McCorvey. She said she became pregnant with the Roe baby during a relationship in Dallas and decided to have an abortion. She said she couldn’t afford to travel to one of the handful of states where it would have been legal.
In her 1994 memoir, “I Am Roe,” she said her adoption attorney put her in touch with Texas lawyers Coffee and Weddington, who were seeking a woman to represent in a legal case to challenge the state’s antiabortion statute. She gave birth to the “Roe” baby in June 1970.
Women like McCorvey, who did not have money to travel, had several undesirable options. They could entrust themselves to abortion providers who were not medical professionals or attempt to perform abortions on themselves — decisions that frequently resulted in infection or death — or they could obtain no abortion at all.
McCorvey was not the first plaintiff to challenge a state abortion law, but Roe v. Wade was the first such case to go to the Supreme Court. McCorvey used the pseudonym Jane Roe to protect her privacy. The defendant, Wade, was the Dallas County district attorney, Henry Wade, an official responsible for enforcing Texas abortion laws.