How the Real Jane Roe Shaped the Abortion Wars
After decades of changing allegiances, Norma McCorvey came to occupy what she called “the mushy middle,” supporting abortion rights with some limits.Photograph by Annie Leibovitz
The all-too-human plaintiff of Roe v. Wade captured the messy contradictions hidden by a polarizing debate.
Roe v. Wade may be the rare Supreme Court decision that most Americans can name, but it’s also one of the few that many volubly disparage—and not just anti-abortion activists who want to get rid of it altogether. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a staunch advocate of access to abortion but an open critic of the reasoning behind Roe. She thought the rationale should have centered on preventing sex discrimination rather than on preserving a right to privacy. “The image you get from reading the Roe v. Wade opinion is it’s mostly a doctor’s-rights case—a doctor’s right to prescribe what he thinks his patient needs,” Ginsburg told the legal writer and scholar Jeffrey Rosen, in 2019. “My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a doctor’s-right notion, but a woman’s right to control her own destiny, to be able to make choices without a Big Brother state telling her what she can and cannot do.”
Ginsburg also declared herself on board with another critique of the decision: namely, that when Roe was handed down, in 1973, it short-circuited a political process whereby states had been gradually legalizing abortion on their own, and thus created the conditions for a polarizing backlash that we are still living through. Although this interpretation is not entirely borne out by the facts—more on that later—it has congealed into conventional wisdom. “Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American,” the columnist David Brooks wrote, in 2005, of the opinion’s author. Roe v. Wade, Brooks argued, “set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since.” Unlike other rulings that recognized new social norms and established new constitutional rights—to interracial marriage and same-sex marriage, for instance—Roe v. Wade remains vulnerable even now, nearly half a century later, to a precedent-flipping, stare-decisis-flouting new ruling. It has never been more so, in fact, than it is now. In the coming term, the conservative-majority Court has agreed to hear a case in which the state of Mississippi is essentially seeking to overturn Roe, along with Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which reaffirmed the right to abortion before the stage of fetal viability. Earlier this month, the Court offered a preview of its orientation when it declined to halt enforcement of an even more draconian Texas law, which bans all abortions after about six weeks, a point at which many women do not even know that they are pregnant.
Roe is unusual in another respect. In most landmark cases, the plaintiff doesn’t stick around like an ornery barfly at closing time, making trouble for all sides. When Jane Roe, whose real name was Norma McCorvey, became a plaintiff in one of the highest-profile cases ever to go before the Supreme Court, she was a broke, divorced, twenty-two-year-old Texan with a ninth-grade education—“a street person, drug addict, drunk,” as she described herself, decades later. Most of her lovers were women, but, in 1970, she was unintentionally pregnant for the third time, by a flaky married guy who was already out of the picture. She wasn’t looking for a crusade when she met with the feminist lawyers Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee at a pizza parlor in Dallas; she was looking for a way to end her pregnancy. Abortion was illegal in Texas, and McCorvey was most likely too far along in her pregnancy to make it to one of the few states where it wasn’t; also, she’d been scared off by a reconnaissance visit to an illegal practitioner closer to home.
By the time the Court handed down its decision in the case, McCorvey had given birth to a baby girl and relinquished her for adoption. She had also met Connie Gonzalez, her devoted partner for many years (although McCorvey cheated on her with gusto), and the two were eking out a living as housecleaners. When McCorvey got the call from Weddington and learned that she’d prevailed in the highest court, the victory didn’t mean much to her. As the journalist Joshua Prager writes in “The Family Roe: An American Story” (Norton), his prodigiously researched, richly detailed, sensitively told account of McCorvey’s strange, and very American, odyssey, “Her own lawyers had not much cared to know her. She, in turn, had not much cared to know about their case; when, months later, Norma listed in her red plastic datebook the important events of 1973, she included the Yom Kippur War, the Texas State Fair, and the closing of a local theater, but not the lawsuit that bore her assumed name.”
McCorvey eventually acknowledged that she was Jane Roe and, in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, began making appearances in the national media. She served as an ambivalent asset to the pro-choice movement, attending rallies, and telling her story—not especially truthfully, according to Prager—in a best-selling 1994 memoir, “I Am Roe.” The ambivalence ran both ways, and was awkwardly riven by class. McCorvey thought the pro-choice leaders were hoity-toity. They left her out of events commemorating Roe where she figured she should have been a featured speaker. She thought they wanted her to be something she wasn’t—“a demure . . . white glove lady.” (She felt differently about the celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred, who did the talk-show circuit with her for a while and brought out McCorvey’s salty, extemporaneous charm.)
Pro-choice activists didn’t really want McCorvey donning white gloves, of all things, but they did tend to see her as a loose cannon and an unreliable narrator of her own life. For years, McCorvey had told reporters that the pregnancy she’d gone to court over had been the result of a rape. When she explained, in a 1987 interview, that it was actually a consensual encounter, the revelation came as an embarrassment to the pro-choice movement. Anti-abortion activists seized on the admission, arguing that it essentially invalidated the Court’s ruling. Prager quotes a letter to a Virginia newspaper from a preacher: “As a result of McCorvey’s lie, more than twenty million babies have been aborted.” In fact, neither McCorvey’s affidavit nor Blackmun’s opinion mentioned anything about how she got pregnant.
Then, in the mid-nineties, while McCorvey was answering phones at an abortion clinic, she met Flip Benham, a former saloonkeeper turned anti-abortion militant. Benham was a born-again-Christian lay minister who preached not only against abortion but also against homosexuality. He kind of liked Norma, though, and, more to the point, he saw in her a prize convert for his movement. Soon he was pressing a Bible into her hands, making her a business card that read “Miss Norma, Slave for Christ,” and baptizing her in a back-yard pool in suburban Dallas. So began McCorvey’s turn as an asset to the other side in the abortion wars. The head of Texans United for Life crowed, “The poster child has jumped off the poster.” In time, McCorvey rebelled against Benham’s insistence that she renounce her lesbianism, but she continued to cast her lot with the anti-abortion side, eventually converting to Catholicism.
Prager is not unsympathetic to McCorvey, but he sees her clearly. He notes that, unlike some of her feminist allies, pro-life leaders, even though they rejected her homosexuality, “made a public point of embracing Norma as she was—blunt and blue-collar.” He paints a believable portrait of a woman who cared about flirting and fun, seduction and sex, attention and affirmation—“watching out for Norma’s salvation and Norma’s ass,” as she once put it—but not about ideology, or politics, or anybody else’s rights, really, let alone their souls. McCorvey confided to Prager, who spent time with her at the end of her life, “It’s really a lot harder on this side because you gotta act like you care. But I don’t really give a shit.”