When most people hear the name "Jane Roe," they think of the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v Wade that established a constitutional right to abortion in the United States. But few know the real story of Norma McCorvey, the complex woman behind the pseudonym who unwittingly became a central figure in the still-raging debate over reproductive rights.
McCorvey‘s early life was marked by hardship and abuse. After coming out as gay to her conservative parents and church community in Texas, McCorvey was beaten by her mother and shipped off to a reform school for "delinquent girls." At 16, she escaped by marrying an abusive man, whom she later claimed was the first of many false stories she made up to gain sympathy as a victim.
In 1970, a 22-year-old McCorvey was pregnant with her third child and desperate for an abortion. But in Texas at the time, the procedure was illegal except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the mother‘s life. McCorvey couldn‘t afford to travel out of state, so she sought the help of two young female lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, who were looking for pregnant women to serve as plaintiffs in a legal challenge to the state‘s abortion ban.
McCorvey signed on to the case, which was filed under the alias "Jane Roe" to protect her identity, while Henry Wade, the Dallas County district attorney, was named as the defendant representing the state of Texas. In a 7-2 decision handed down on January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that a woman‘s right to choose an abortion was protected by an implied "right to privacy" in the Fourteenth Amendment, and that states could not ban the procedure in the first trimester of pregnancy.
Roe v Wade was a watershed moment for women‘s rights in America. But in a sad twist of fate, McCorvey herself never got the abortion she sought – she carried her pregnancy to term and gave the baby up for adoption while her case slowly worked its way through the courts. And in the years after the decision, she struggled to find her place in the pro-choice movement that had made her its inadvertent poster child.
As McCorvey later told the L.A. Times, "The pro-lifers would holler, ‘don‘t go in there and kill your baby‘, I would yell, ‘oh, shut up.‘" But behind closed doors, she bristled at how the mainstream reproductive rights groups treated her – inviting her to rallies and fundraisers only to give short, token speeches, never making her feel fully welcome or appreciated for her role in their cause. "I was a nobody to them," she recalled bitterly. "They only cared about themselves and their agenda."
Alienated and adrift, McCorvey shocked the world in 1995 when she abruptly switched sides and became an anti-abortion activist. After forging an unlikely friendship with Flip Benham, an evangelical preacher and leader of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, McCorvey publicly declared herself a born-again Christian and dedicated her life to overturning the very ruling that bore her famous alias. She even filed a lawsuit in 2003 seeking to have Roe v Wade repealed, arguing that the case had been decided based on bad science and false pretenses.
But once again, McCorvey found herself reduced to a pawn in someone else‘s political chess match. While the mainstream anti-abortion movement initially welcomed her conversion story with open arms, many began to distance themselves as her erratic behavior and abrasive personality became a liability. Despite her heartfelt renunciation of her lesbian identity to appease her new evangelical allies, McCorvey still didn‘t quite fit into the traditional mold of the conservative Christian activist.
Suffering from decades of emotional trauma and substance abuse issues, McCorvey spent her final years in poverty, bouncing between low-paying jobs, failed business ventures, and the dwindling trickle of paid speaking gigs for the warring factions still fighting to claim her as their own. In her last on-camera interview for the 2020 FX documentary "AKA Jane Roe," filmed shortly before her death from heart failure in 2017, McCorvey dropped one final bombshell: Her anti-abortion crusade, she confessed, had all been an act, financially motivated by the $450,000 she collected from right-wing groups over the years to be their public mouthpiece.
"I took their money and they put me out in front of the camera and told me what to say, and that‘s what I‘d say," she says in the film, gazing wearily into the camera. "I did it well, too. I am a good actress. Of course I‘m not acting now."
Whether McCorvey was telling the truth in those final moments, or simply rewriting her own story one last time, will likely never be known. But her complicated legacy is a reminder that even the most public and politicized of lives contain multitudes, hidden depths and unresolved contradictions that defy easy characterization.
In the end, perhaps the most fitting tribute to Norma McCorvey is to remember her not as a hero or a villain, a victim or a con artist, but simply as a flawed, wounded, deeply human woman who found herself thrust into the center of a still-unfolding civil rights battle much bigger than any one person‘s personal story. Her experiences speak to the high stakes of the abortion debate for the real women caught in the crosshairs of the culture wars. More than fifty years after Roe v Wade, with the Supreme Court on the brink of delivering a potential death blow to the landmark ruling, those stakes have never been higher – for Jane Roe, and for all whose lives she touched.
