Feb. 18 (UPI) — Norma McCorvey, the woman behind the pseudonym Jane Roe in the 1973 case Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion in the United States, died of heart failure Saturday, her biographer said. She was 69.
McCorvey had been living at an assisted-living facility in Katy, Texas, at the time of her death, according to Joshua Prager, a journalist who profiled McCorvey in Vanity Fair in 2013 and is writing a forthcoming book on the subject.
While her personal life took many turns in the years since the landmark Supreme Court decision, it was a young McCorvey — struggling with substance abuse, physical abuse, poverty and emotional frailty — who unwittingly walked into the history books when she sought to terminate an unwanted pregnancy in her home state of Texas in 1970.
At the time, abortion was a state issue and Texas, like many states, had a law in place making abortion illegal except when the mother’s life was in danger. Wealthier women traveled to states where the procedure was legal or easily obtainable, but women from Texas in McCorvey’s position didn’t have that option.
Instead, she was left with several less-appealing options as a woman seeking to terminate a pregnancy: pay for an illegal abortion from an unlicensed practitioner, attempt to perform one on herself, or carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.
McCorvey was referred to a lawyer, Sarah Weddington, a recent law school graduate who, with her partner Linda Coffee, had been looking for a case to challenge the Texas abortion law.
Using the pseudonym Jane Roe, the two filed suit against Henry Wade, the Dallas County district attorney who was responsible for enforcing the Texas abortion ban where McCorvey lived.
Three years later in a landmark 7-2 decision that has come to define the nation’s cultural, political and religious divides, the Supreme Court articulated a constitutional right to privacy conferred by the 14th Amendment, which included a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.
To supporters, it enshrined legal protection for women to be in charge of their own bodies and lives. For detractors, it legalized the murder of unborn children.
For McCorvey, who learned of the decision by reading about it in a newspaper back home, the decision meant little. It came two-and-a-half years after she gave birth to the child and gave it away for adoption.
McCorvey shed her Jane Roe pseudonym in the 1990s and stepped into the public debate in confounding ways. She lent her story of a pregnancy conceived after a rape to the women’s rights movement. Later, she admitted she was not raped, but the child was conceived with a former lover she didn’t want to see anymore.
After becoming a symbol of the feminist movement, McCorvey made an abrupt about-face and became a born-again Christian, siding with one of the nation’s most ardent anti-abortion critics, the Rev. Flip Benham, leader of the group Operation Rescue. McCorvey took a middle-ground position, saying she opposed abortion after the first trimester, which angered both sides who believed it should either be legal or illegal in nearly all instances.
Eventually both sides of the debate soured on McCorvey, with Benham telling journalists he believed McCorvey came over to the anti-abortion movement out of a desire to make money. Weddington, her former lawyer, said she believed McCorvey’s actions after the Roe v. Wade decision were an effort to get attention.
Who cares what the bible says. Not me.