The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
For abortion foes, Trump’s allyship blunts ‘Roe’ revelation
NEW YORK — Norma McCorvey’s admission that her conversion from the face of abortion rights — as the “Jane Roe” of the historic 1973 Supreme Court case — to an opponent of the practice came with payments from anti-abortion activists might seem to be a blow to their movement.
But the headline-making revelations McCorvey offered in the recently premiered documentary “AKA Jane Roe” stand little chance of denting anti-abortion activists’ momentum in Washington.
In fact, leading religious conservatives and some of their critics agree that the antiabortion alliance of Catholics and evangelicals has come to wield outsized political influence, thanks to their close ties to President Donald Trump’s administration.
Anti-abortion activists are largely dismissing McCorvey’s on-camera “deathbed confession” about the authenticity of her work on their behalf. Pointing to the complexity of McCorvey’s personality and her beliefs, abortion opponents contend that the new film misrepresents her genuine qualms about terminating pregnancies.
The Rev. Frank Pavone, leader of Priests for Life and a prominent Catholic Trump supporter, grew close to McCorvey during her transition to Christianity as she became an anti-abortion advocate in 1995. Pavone said McCorvey’s “burden of pain” from her involvement in the Roe v. Wade decision was unquestionably real, despite her tendency to air blunt grievances and say “things that make her seem like two different people.”
“If she was making up her regret,” Pavone said of McCorvey, “what we witnessed and what we went through with her would have been impossible.”
He was among more than two dozen anti-abortion activists who last week wrote to the chairman of FX Entertainment and the film’s director, taking issue with its depiction of McCorvey as a feigned convert to their side. Their letter asserts that their movement is making headway against abortion rights, prompting counterefforts by abortion supporters.
Indeed, a major test in the nation’s decades-long battles over abortion is set to come by the end of June, when the Supreme Court is expected to issue its first major ruling on an abortion case since the addition of two justices appointed by Trump — Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Anti-abortion groups and the Trump administration hope the court will signal its willingness to take weaken protections for abortion by upholding a Louisiana law that would require doctors at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.
No matter what happens in that case, however, the negative effect of the McCorvey documentary has been minimal compared with the victories notched by anti-abortion activists under Trump.
The film shows McCorvey, shortly before her 2017 death at age 69, saying she took money from anti-abortion groups “and they put me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say.” Both Pavone and Rev. Rob Schenck, a prominent evangelical and former antiabortion activist, described some of that compensation as more indirect than a specific payment to leave the abortionrights camp.