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Norma McCorvey, the Jane Roe at the center of Roe v. Wade, was an imperfect plaintiff.
When she took Rowe as a young single woman in Dallas, she didn’t think about the fight for reproductive rights. She barely made ends meet as a waitress, twice gave birth to children for adoption and simply wanted an abortion. She later lied about how she got pregnant, saying she was raped. When she came clean more than a decade later and wished to join seriously the movement she had come to represent, its leaders denied her meaningful participation in their protests and rallies.
“I think they’re embarrassed,” McCorvey told Texas Monthly in 1993. “They’d like me to be college-educated, poised, and little white gloves.”
Yet Roe remains central to McCorvey’s life, bound to her by those same two crosscurrents that would frame the abortion debate in the United States—religion and sex.
McCorvey had hundreds of partners, almost all women, she said. She also worked as a prostitute in Dallas for a while. But she was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness and considered sex a sin. That her complaint made abortion legal makes her fear for her soul. That was part of the reason she was born again in 1995, she said — the better to join the fight against Roe.
Yet despite his public disavowal, McCorvey — like the majority of Americans now — believed that abortion should be legal in the first trimester. She shared this in the first interview she gave, days after Roe, and she shared it again in her last, speaking to me from her hospital bed at the end of her life. (During my decade of research for The Roe Family, a book about Roe and his suitor, I spent hundreds of hours interviewing McCorvey.)
Her personal papers—which I found in her ex-partner’s garage just before the house was lost to foreclosure—offer a first-hand view of McCorvey as she really was: a woman whose anguish and ambivalence about abortion mirror those who divide country, and which continues to be relevant in the new post-Roe world.
Here is a sample of the material.
McCorvey was sent to a Catholic boarding school and later, at age 16, to a state boarding school for “delinquent girls”. She liked being away from her family and had a bunch of girlfriends. But her mother, Mary Sandefer, beat her for being gay, Sandefer said in an interview, and McCorvey came to see sex and her sexuality as sinful and illegitimate. Years after she became pregnant for the third time and sought an abortion, she told people she had been raped, presenting herself not as a sinner but as a victim.
McCorvey is the third generation in her family to become pregnant out of wedlock, according to documents and interviews with her family members. Her grandmother quickly remarried, and her mother was forced to leave town, give birth in secret, and hand her child over to her parents.
McCorvey worked many things to get by – waitress and drug dealer, prostitute and painter, respiratory therapist and bondsman. Money was a constant struggle. And when, in 1969, she became pregnant and found an unlicensed doctor to perform an abortion, she could neither afford his $500 fee nor the cost of flying to California, where abortion was legal.
Over time, McCorvey turned his complaint into a career and repeatedly changed his public stance depending on his audience. But her personal views on abortion did not change: the day after her Christian rebirth, as well as at the end of her life, she reiterated what she first told The Baptist Press in 1973: that abortion should be legal in the first trimester.
Leaders in the abortion rights movement were understandably uneasy when McCorvey admitted in 1987 that he had lied about being raped. But even after apologizing and devoting years to educating herself about Roe and abortion, she was largely shunned — “despised, dismissed, ignored, discredited and excluded,” in the words of Barbara Ellis, a movement activist.
In April 1970, Linda Coffey and Sarah Weddington, the two attorneys representing McCorvey, amended Roe v. Wade to make it a class action not only on her behalf, they wrote, but also including “all other similarly situated women.” They described this situation in an affidavit, arguing among many other things that their pseudonymous plaintiff could not afford to travel to places where abortion was legal and safe.
McCorvey found solace in religion, especially the patron saints and rosaries that became part of her daily life after converting to Catholicism in 1998. But she also told a filmmaker in 1995 that if the abortion rights movement had embraced, she would never have left him. She said she was most upset when she learned in 1992 that her lawyer, Weddington, who had not tried to help McCorvey get an abortion, had had one herself.
That was completely false. The first time McCorvey talked about rape was in a Good Housekeeping article published in June 1973, five months after the Roe decision. Her attorney, Coffey, said in an interview that the article was the first time she and her co-defendant learned of McCorvey’s rape allegations.
Joshua Prager is the author of The Roe Family: An American Story, a dual biography of Roe v. Wade and its plaintiff. The book was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
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