Abortion case’s ‘Roe’ dies at 69
Texan behind landmark decision ‘at peace at end’
Norma McCorvey, the Texas woman behind the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion and fueled decades of contentious political debate that continues to reverberate today, died Saturday morning at an assisted-living facility in Katy. She was 69.
After three years of deteriorating health, she died of heart failure following a brief stay in the intensive care unit, according to a close family friend. She’d been hospitalized more than a dozen times, mainly for breathing troubles, since moving to Katy in January 2016 to be near her oldest daughter.
“She was very much at peace at the end,” said close friend and anti-abortion advocate Karen Garnett, who traveled from Dallas to be at her bedside for several days last week.
McCorvey was 22, unmarried and struggling with addiction and poverty when she unwit-
tingly gained national fame as the anonymous lead plaintiff in the watershed Supreme Court ruling that allowed women to obtain abortions in the first two trimesters of pregnancy.
“I’m really kind of just saddened by this,” Linda Coffee, the Texas attorney who represented McCorvey in the high-profile case filed in 1970, told the Chronicle on Saturday after she learned of McCorvey’s death. “For so long there’s been three people when you think of this case: You think of Sarah Weddington and Norma McCorvey and me.”
Weddington, Coffee’s co-counsel, said she was sorry to hear the news — but also offered a more biting take on the controversial woman at the center of one of the most contentious court decisions in history.
“One thing I’ve learned is that around Norma you have to know you can’t believe almost anything she says,” Weddington said from her Austin home Saturday.
Although McCorvey’s lawyers pursued the groundbreaking legal action under the pseudonym Jane Roe in order to preserve their client’s anonymity, McCorvey later shed her Roe mantle and eventually came out as an abortion foe and born-again Christian.
“I’m 100 percent pro-life. I don’t believe in abortion even in an extreme situation. If the woman is impregnated by a rapist, it’s still a child. You’re not to act as your own God,” she told the Associated Press in 1988.
After her death, anti-abortion groups stepped up to mourn.
Texas Right to Life President Jim Graham called McCorvey — who never actually had an abortion — a “beautiful soul who transformed her life.”
“Texas Right to Life was blessed and honored to befriend and to work closely with Norma for decades, and her contributions to the pro-life movement are too great to be estimated,” he said in a statement.
National Director of Priests for Life Father Frank Pavone praised McCorvey’s conversion to Christianity and offered condolences.
“I’m sorry she won’t be here to celebrate with me when we finally abolish legal abortion in this country, but I know she will be watching,” he said.
Garnett, former executive director of the Catholic Pro-Life Committee of North Texas, described her as “passionate” and “feisty.”
“She did not have any idea what actually would follow from that case when she was first involved in it,” Garnett told the Chronicle. “She was so sorry that so many millions of children’s lives were lost over the last 44 years and yet she came to a place of tremendous peace through the grace of God.”
Becoming Jane Roe
Born in 1947 in a small village in Louisiana, McCorvey lived in Houston and Dallas before her family shipped her off to reform school in the North Texas town of Gainesville.
At 16, she married Woody McCorvey, then left while pregnant and came out as a lesbian.
“My mom screamed, ‘ What did a lesbian know about raising a child?’ I lost my child, and my home,” she said in 1988, claiming her mother took custody of the baby.
She gave a second child up for adoption and was pregnant for the third time when an adoption attorney put her in touch with lawyers Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington.
The three women met up in a Dallas diner and decided to make McCorvey their lead plaintiff — although the lawyers had their doubts.
“I was worried about taking the case because she looked so far along,” Coffee said.
But to make their case, the two young attorneys only needed their client to be pregnant when the case started.
In the end, Coffee and Weddington were satisfied that McCorvey could be the plaintiff they needed, though Weddington expressed some retrospective doubt about the fateful decision.
“I was too young to know that your clients lied,” said Wedding- ton. “It would have been nice if I’d picked somebody else.”
But, despite the troubled client, ultimately the case — a classaction suit naming Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade as the defendant — made it to the Supreme Court and scored an overwhelming victory on the national stage.
“It’s meant a lot to many women around the nation,” Weddington said.
Justice Harry Blackmun — appointed by President Richard Nixon — wrote an opinion declaring the Constitution’s right to privacy “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”
“The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent,” he wrote.
After the Jan. 22, 1973, decision — issued long after McCorvey had given birth and offered the baby up for adoption — the troubled woman at the center of the case made her identity public. In the 1980s, she became a pro-choice activist and for a time worked at an abortion clinic in Dallas.
And though she initially claimed the pregnancy that sparked the high-stakes legal wrangling was the result of rape, she later recanted.
In 1994, she put out a tell-all autobiography, offering gritty details on her dysfunctional family, reform school, history of petty crime, struggle with alcoholism and an attempted suicide.
Religious conversions
Then the following year she did an about-face with a televised baptism performed by abortion foe the Rev. Philip “Flip” Benham.
After finding her faith, McCorvey abandoned her longtime lover, Connie Gonzalez, decrying homosexuality as a sin.
In 1998, she put out a book detailing her evangelical conversion, but by the end of the year she’d converted again to Catholicism.
She later called her involvement in Roe v. Wade “the biggest mistake of my life” and publicly disparaged her attorneys as “selfinterested” women who “exploited” her. In 2003, she embarked on a failed bid to have the case overturned.
“She lives for the day that Roe v. Wade will be reversed,” her lawyer Allan Parker told the Chronicle at the time.
But Weddington, now 72, has her doubts.
“I have never been sure if she was really against abortion,” she said, describing McCorvey as someone who was “always looking for money.”
But as the controversial, everchanging activist’s legacy is put to rest, the women of her erstwhile legal team worry about what’s ahead for the decision that bears her name.
“All of us who want to be sure that womencan continue to make their own choices are very concerned about what the future is,” Weddington said. “If you look at what’s the future, it just depends on who’s on the Supreme Court.”