Norma McCorvey, who was 22, unwed, mired in addiction and poverty, and desperate for a way out of an unwanted pregnancy when she became Jane Roe, the pseudonymous plaintiff of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that established a constitutional right to an abortion, died Saturday at an assisted-living facility in Katy, Texas. She was 69.
Her death was confirmed by Joshua Prager, a journalist currently at work on a book about Roe v. Wade. The cause was a heart ailment.
McCorvey was a complicated protagonist in a legal case that became a touchstone in the culture wars, celebrated by champions as an affirmation of women’s freedom and denounced by opponents as the legalization of murder of the unborn.
When she filed suit in 1970, she was looking not for a sweeping ruling for all women from the highest court in the land, but rather, simply, the right to legally and safely end a pregnancy that she did not wish to carry forward. In her home State of Texas, as in most other states, abortion was prohibited except when the mother’s life was at stake.
On Jan. 22, 1973, the Supreme Court handed down its historic 7-to-2 ruling, written by Justice Harry A. Blackmun, articulating a constitutional right to privacy that included the choice to terminate a pregnancy.
The ruling established the trimester framework, designed to balance a woman’s right to control her body and a state’s compelling interest in protecting unborn life. Although later modified, it was a landmark of American jurisprudence and made Jane Roe a figurehead — championed or reviled — in the battle over reproductive rights that continued into the 21st century.
McCorvey fully shed her courtroom pseudonym in the 1980s, lending her name first to supporters of abortion rights and then, in a stunning reversal, to the cause’s fiercest critics as a born-again Christian.
But even after two memoirs, she remained an enigma, as difficult to know as when she shielded her identity behind the name Jane Roe.
She admitted that she peddled misinformation about herself, lying about even the most crucial juncture in her life: For years, she claimed that the Roe pregnancy was the result of a rape.
In 1987, she recanted, saying that she had become pregnant “through what I thought was love.” Although the details of her account were legally unimportant, abortion foes pointed to the lie to discredit McCorvey and her case.
According to the most sympathetic tellings of her story, she was a victim of abuse, financial hardship, drug and alcohol addiction, and personal frailty. For much of her life, she subsisted at the margins of society, making ends meet, according to various accounts, as a bartender, a maid, a roller-skating carhop and a house painter.
She found a measure of stability with a lesbian partner, Connie Gonzalez, but even that relationship reportedly ended in bitterness after 35 years.
Harsher judgments presented McCorvey as a user who trolled for attention and cash. Abortion rights activists questioned her motives when McCorvey decamped in 1994, after years as a poster child for their cause, and was baptized in a swimming pool by the evangelical minister at the helm of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.
The minister, Flip Benham, told Prager, who profiled McCorvey in Vanity Fair magazine in 2013, that he had come to see McCorvey as someone who “just fishes for money.”
By her own description, she was “a simple woman with a ninth-grade education.” She presented herself as the victim of her attorneys, Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, whom she accused of exploiting the predicament of her unwanted pregnancy to score a victory for the abortion rights cause.
Roe v. Wade, which became a class-action suit, was a watershed for women in general but irrelevant for McCorvey in particular.
After an initial court victory for her, Texas mounted an appeal that dragged on long past McCorvey’s due date. By the time the Supreme Court announced its decision, her baby was 2 ½ years old. She had given the child up for adoption and learned of the ruling in a newspaper article.
Norma Nelson — her middle name was variously spelled Lea, Leah and Leigh — was born in Simmesport, Louisiana, on Sept. 22, 1947. Her father, a television repairman, was largely absent from her life.
She grew up in Texas, spending part of her adolescence in a Catholic boarding school and at a reform school for delinquents. Her mother told Prager that she beat her daughter in fits of rage over the “wild” behaviour that included sexual promiscuity with men and women.
In her teens, Norma began a short-lived marriage to a sheet-metal worker, Elwood “Woody” McCorvey. Her mother raised their daughter, Melissa. McCorvey’s second baby, born out of wedlock, was adopted by another family.
She said she became pregnant with the Roe baby during a relationship in Dallas. An adoption lawyer referred her to Coffee who, like Weddington, was a recent law school graduate seeking a plaintiff to test the constitutionality of the Texas abortion law.
At the time, many well-to-do women seeking abortions travelled to states or countries where the procedure was legal or easily available, according to Leslie J. Reagan, a historian and the author of the volume “When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973.”
Women like McCorvey, who did not have money to travel, had several undesirable options. They could entrust themselves to abortion providers who were not medical professionals or attempt to perform abortions on themselves — decisions that frequently resulted in infection or death — or they could obtain no abortion at all.
McCorvey was not the first plaintiff to challenge a state abortion law, but Roe v. Wade was the first such case to work its way through the appeals process to the Supreme Court. She used the pseudonym Jane Roe to protect her privacy. The defendant, Wade, was the Dallas County district attorney, Henry Wade, an official responsible for enforcing Texas abortion laws.
Years later, McCorvey expressed bitterness at what she described as her attorneys’ unwillingness to help her find what she needed — an abortion, even an illegal one.
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