Norma McCorvey

Norma McCorvey (born September 22, 1947, Simmesport, Louisiana, U.S.—died February 18, 2017, Katy, Texas) was an American activist who was the original plaintiff (anonymized as Jane Roe) in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade (1973), which made abortion legal throughout the United States.

McCorvey grew up in Texas, the daughter of a single alcoholic mother. She got into trouble frequently and at one point was sent to a reform school. She married and became pregnant at 16 but divorced before the child was born; she subsequently relinquished custody of the child to her mother. In 1967 she gave up a second child for adoption immediately after giving birth. When she became pregnant again in 1969, she wanted to have an abortion. In Texas at the time, such a procedure was legal only if the mother’s life would be endangered by carrying the pregnancy to term. McCorvey was referred to feminist lawyers Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, who had been seeking just such a client to challenge the laws restricting access to abortion.

McCorvey was hoping that she would quickly gain permission to receive an abortion, but she was unsuccessful. Coffee and Weddington changed the case to a class-action suit, and, by the time a ruling was made by a federal three-judge panel in June that the Texas law against abortion was unconstitutional, McCorvey had given birth and again given up the infant for adoption. The state of Texas appealed, and in 1973 the Supreme Court ruled that during the first trimester of pregnancy a pregnant woman did have the right to have an abortion “free of interference by the State.”

Though McCorvey identified herself shortly thereafter as the plaintiff Jane Roe, she remained mostly out of the limelight for the next decade. In the early 1980s she began volunteering at an abortion clinic and also began speaking out in favour of the right to choose, becoming increasingly well known. In 1989 McCorvey was portrayed by the actress Holly Hunter in the TV movie Roe vs. Wade, and that same year activist lawyer Gloria Allred took McCorvey under her wing.

However, in 1995 McCorvey befriended Philip Benham, head of the aggressive pro-life organization Operation Rescue, and she soon began campaigning against the right to abortion. In 1998 she converted to Roman Catholicism after coming under the influence of Frank Pavone, who led the pro-life Priests for Life. But in the documentary AKA Jane Roe (2020), a dying McCorvey claimed that she had been paid by anti-abortion groups to support their cause.

McCorvey published two memoirs: I Am Roe (1994; with Andy Meisler) and Won by Love (1997; with Gary Thomas).