Her parents, Olin and Mary Nelson, had pledged themselves to Jehovah when she was a girl, and McCorvey and her brother had knocked on doors in east Texas with religious literature, hocking thou shalt notsabortion among them. On the phone in 1994, according to Thornton, McCorvey told her that she should have thanked her for not having an abortion. At birth, this baby was given up to a waiting adoptive couple that has kept its identity private. The antipathy between mother and daughter was quickly apparent. First reported by Politico in early May, the draft represented a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of Roe, according to reporters Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward. I was just a pawn, and I wasn't going to let her do it," she . McCorvey's father, Olin Nelson, a TV repairman, left the family when McCorvey was 13 years old, and her parents subsequently divorced. Justice Harry Blackmuns opinion, giving women the right of choice, while protecting the states interest in preserving life in the later stages of pregnancy, in effect overturned anti-abortion laws in almost all of the 50 states. McCorvey alleges in I Am Roe that Mary kidnapped Melissa, tricking Norma into signing adoption papers on the pretense that the papers had to do with insurance. Connie Gonzalez, a fellow Planned Parenthood employee and McCorvey's longtime lover until her conversion, has a different perspective: She says Benham was a charming phony who was nice to people . In 1963, at age 16, Norma Leah Nelson married Woody McCorvey. I didnt have a stable She stops. [13] She voiced remorse for her part in the Supreme Court decision and said she had been a pawn for abortion activists. They begin with the photocopied birth certificate of Norma Lea Nelson, born in Simmesport, Louisiana, on September 22, 1947four ounces shy of seven pounds. I would deliver the baby, Lane, now 75, recalls. Gonzalez, she would recall, covered her with her body. [14] Her doctor, Richard Lane, suggested that she consult Henry McCluskey, an adoption lawyer in Dallas. When the Associated Press asked McCorvey for a comment, she said, Im horrified.. Reportedly, the brunch at Baci was a benefit for the Jane Roe Foundation. I almost forgot i have a one thousand dollar fee, she texted in August in response to a request for an interview. I took their money and theyd put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say. The conservative film Roe v. Wade, starring Jon Voight and Stacey Dash depicted McCorveys conversion in the famous case of the same name. I helped work out that deal. Won by Love laid out a life that, after profane beginnings, was in full compliance with evangelical ideals. The remaining justices deemed the Texas laws unconstitutional by a 4-to-3 majority. I was good at it, too.. The next year, McCorvey made a public plea for financial helpbecause we were hungry, as she told The Dallas Morning News. Mary Sandefur (formerly Nelson), 90 this month, resides in an assisted-living home in a suburb of Houston. When she returned, her mother replaced Melissa with a baby doll and reported Norma to the police as having abandoned her baby, and called the police to take her out of the house. In September 1969, 21-year-old McCorvey became pregnant for the third time. Her socked feetpink-toed and bearing in black marker her room number, 225Arolled her wheelchair slowly back and forth. [6][24] In 1983, McCorvey told the press that she had been raped; in 1987, she said the rape claim was untrue. She was already five months pregnant. Included in the documentary also are scenes from the presidential election night in 2016, depicting McCorveys disappointment as Democrat Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. She left him and gave birth to a daughter, Melissa, in 1965. Two months later, according to a letter from her lawyer, McCorvey made arrangements to have yet another new foundation, Crossing Over Ministry, take ownership of the Dallas home she shared with Gonzalez. After first claiming she had been gang-raped, thinking that might get her a legal abortion, and seeking an illegal one as well, she visited the Dallas lawyers Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee. Coffee and Weddington seemed to be less interested, understandably, in the predicament of one plaintiff than in the rights of millions. She was decried as a baby-killer and faced death-threats, but she still spoke at a massive pro-choice Washington rally in 1989, the same year Holly Hunter won an Emmy playing her in a television film. [18][19][20] Due to a lack of police evidence or documentation, the scheme was not successful, and McCorvey later said it was a fabrication. There was something else in it for McCorvey, something practical. You can only take so much of nerviness. "Jane Roe" redirects here. Abortion was not yet the political football it would become in this country; the Supreme Court affirmed Roe v. Wade by a 7-2 majority. Connie Gonzalez, who has been Ms. McCorvey's partner for the last 21 years, turns on the television to the O. J. Simpson hearings before heading into the kitchen to scramble eggs and fry. When, two years later, President Gerald Ford nominated John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court, Roe was not even mentioned during his confirmation hearings. Crossing Over Ministry was a Catholic group devoted to reversing Roe v. Wade. It also gave states the right to ban most abortions in the third trimester.). Do not vote for Barack Obama, McCorvey said against a background of images of aborted fetuses. Linda Tovar moved in to care for her aunt. But if they ended, like so much Scripture, in redemption, they were largely fiction, filled with sufferings she simply had not endured. Her eyes were light blue and cloudy, her white hair pulled back in a braid. [12][13][11], Later, McCorvey was sent to the State School for Girls in Gainesville, Texas, on and off from ages 11 to 15. McCorvey would soon dismiss Jehovah, deciding at age 14 in a state correctional school (where she was sent after running away from home) that God did not exist. "She's a phony," said Connie Gonzalez, McCorvey's lesbian partner of 35 yearsfrom 1971 until 2006in a 2013 Vanity Fair expose about McCorvey. Pro-life. McCorvey, Norma Leah Nelson [Jane Roe] (1947-2017). ABC. . And although she spent most of her nights in the numb comfort of lesbian bars, McCorvey found herself, at 22, single and pregnant for a third time. Young Norma McCorvey had not wanted to further a cause; she had simply wanted an abortion and could not get one in Texas. For several years after Roe, McCorvey lived quietly with her girlfriend, Connie Gonzales. I heard the shotgun blast go off in my sleep, like a crack of thunder in a bright blue sky, McCorvey later wrote in I Am Roe. https://t.co/XBwvPKmSqU. I felt like I was high. Norma Leah Nelson McCorvey (September 22, 1947 February 18, 2017), also known by the pseudonym "Jane Roe", was the plaintiff in the landmark American legal case Roe v. Wade in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that individual state laws banning abortion were unconstitutional. After giving birth to a daughter in 1965, she began struggling with drug and alcohol abuse, eventually relinquishing custody to her mother (though whether she did so voluntarily is up for debate). She is preceded in death by her husband of 59 years, William. In 2004, McCorvey sought to have the U.S. Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade, saying that there was now evidence that the procedure harms women, but the case was ultimately dismissed in 2005. [2] McCorvey told the press that she was "Jane Roe" soon after the decision was reached, stating that she had sought an abortion because she was unemployable and greatly depressed. I hadnt been out three or four years. "She knew that she was dying," said Allan Parker, a public interest attorney who served as her legal counsel for 12 years. Gonzalez applied for food stamps in 2005. McCorvey concedes in her first book that, while Mary was raising Melissa, she herself was raising Cainabusing drugs and alcohol, and sleeping with a string of women. For the generic placeholder name, see, U.S. Senate hearings for the confirmation, "Norma McCorvey: Of Roe, Dreams and Choices", "Roe v Wade's Jane Roe says she was paid to speak against abortion in shocking FX documentary", "Testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Federalism and Property Rights", "Identity of 'Roe baby' revealed after decades of secrecy", "Miss Norma & Her Baby: Two Victims Who Got Away", "Norma McCorvey, plaintiff in Roe ruling who later became pro-life, dies", "Court rejects motion to overturn Roe v. Wade Sep 14, 2004", "Norma McCorvey, 'Jane Roe' of Roe v. Wade, dies", "The Epic Life of the Woman Behind Roe v. Wade", "The Fascinating Story Of The Woman At The Center Of Roe v. Wade", "In Death, Jane Roe Finally Tells The Truth About Her Life", "The woman behind 'Roe vs. Wade' didn't change her mind on abortion. McCorvey had come to visit briefly in the Dallas trailer park on Fadeway Street, where Mary had been living. [2] I was a woman alone with no place to go and no job, McCorvey told the Southern Baptist Convention news service in 1973. In AKA Jane Roe, Norma claims that her mother never wanted a second child and made her feel worthless. She later left him after he allegedly assaulted her. McCorvey stepped out of the shadows in the 1980s to counsel women at pregnancy clinics, and in 1987 became a cause celebre when she admitted in a TV interview that she had lied when she claimed to have been raped, though that played no part in the case that went to the supreme court. Telling The Guardian that President Obama is guilty of "child killing," she also said, "When I got arrested, I loved it! Holly Hunter would win an Emmy for playing McCorvey (renamed Ellen Russell) in Roe vs. Wade, an NBC television movie that aired the following month. [15][17], On May 22, 2020, a documentary titled AKA Jane Roe aired on FX, describing McCorvey's life and the financial incentives to change her views on abortion. [10], McCorvey had trouble with the law that began at the age of ten, when she robbed the cash register at a gas station and ran away to Oklahoma City with a friend. McCorvey died in 2017, of a progressive lung disease in a nursing home in Katy, Texas. In the film, directed by Nick Sweeney, McCorvey offers what she calls a "deathbed confession," shortly before her 2017 death at 69, in which she claims that the pro-life movement paid her to. McCorvey's mother was raised a Pentecostal but McCorvey's father led her and the family as Jehovah's Witnesses. As individuals across the country reckon with the prospectof a post-Roe America, the story of the court case that first codified the constitutional right to an abortion is making headlines once again. An alcohol-fueled affair at 19 begat a second child. (McCorvey had relationships with both men and women but self-identified as a lesbian.) But the foundation received no money. She would not tell her where Melissa was for weeks, and finally let her visit her child after three months. It just hit me like a big squish, she said of her newfound faith. But traces of McCorvey remained everywhere in the ranch house. For years she also maintained publicly that the Roe pregnancy was the result of . Norma was incredibly complex.. By 2021, she had met her two half-siblings, but not her birth mother. She dropped out of high school at 14, married at 16, and divorced her abusive husband . I never go anywhere w/o Ms. Connie, she wrote to a Catholic organization that had invited her to speak in New Zealand in 2000. That's why they call it choice," she added. McCorvey stated that she was only interested in an abortion, but agreed to meet with McCluskey. McCorveys former lawyer, Sarah Weddington, said, All Jane Roe ever did was sign a one-page legal affidavit. But Charlotte Taft, the womens-rights advocate, regrets that the pro-choice camp did not make McCorvey feel more needed or more special. Norma McCorvey, Jane Roe of Roe v. . . A lawsuit. What I didnt have the guts to say was, because I know damn well were playing her.. [2], Later in her life, McCorvey became an Evangelical Protestant and in her remaining years, a Roman Catholic, and took part in the anti-abortion movement. Shelley Lynn Thornton has said she has no regrets about not meeting her biological mother. A little bit of hell broke loose, recalls Charlotte Taft, an abortion-rights activist and the founder of the Routh Street Womens Clinic, in Dallas. Aug. 12, 1995 Norma (Jane Roe) McCorvey's sudden conversion from abortion- rights symbol to new darling of the anti-abortion movement may have shocked pro-choice leaders across the nation, but. She also made TV ads against Obama in 2012, saying: He murders babies., She was the subject of a 1998 documentary, Roe vs Roe: Baptism by Fire, and featured in Lake of Fire (2006), a pro-choice film. According to McCorvey, friends advised her that she should assert falsely that she had been raped by a group of black men and that she could thereby obtain a legal abortion under Texas's law, which prohibited most abortion; sources differ over whether Texas law had such a rape exception. In 1991, Thornton became pregnant and did not have an abortion because abortion was "not part of who I was". But Justice Harry A. Blackmun, whod been tasked with writing the majority opinion, suggested rearguing the case in front of the full bencha polarizing proposal that sparked fears among the majority that the two replacement justices would vote against them. Briefly in the predicament of one plaintiff than in the Supreme Court decision and said has. 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