Norma McCorvey obituary

Jane Roe, the anonymous plaintiff in the Roe v Wade case by which the US supreme court legalised abortion, became an icon for feminism. But the real Jane Roe, Norma McCorvey, who has died aged 69 of heart failure, was an unlikely heroine, unwilling to take the spotlight and uncomfortable with it when she finally did. Then she underwent a Damascene conversion and became an equally iconic anti-abortion campaigner.

McCorvey was 22 and pregnant for the third time when in 1969 she sought an abortion, then illegal under Texas law except when necessary to save the mother’s life. Born Norma Nelson in Simmesport, Louisiana, she had a difficult childhood. Her father, Olin, a TV repairman, abandoned the family. Her mother, Mildred, known as Mary, an alcoholic, moved Norma and her brother, James, to Houston, Texas. At the age of 10, Norma robbed the till at a gas station and ran away with a girlfriend. They took a motel room in Oklahoma City, but were caught when a maid walked in on the two girls kissing and reported them to the police.

Norma was made a ward of the court and sent to state institutions. She described this as the happiest time of her life. At 15 she was sent to live with a cousin who abused her sexually. At 16 she left school and was working as a waitress when she met and married a sheet-metal worker, Woody McCorvey. He beat her, before and after she became pregnant. She left him and gave birth to a daughter, Melissa, in 1965. She began drinking heavily and came out as a lesbian. When she left her baby with her mother, to take a weekend trip, Mary charged her with abandonment, and soon afterwards made her sign what Norma thought were insurance papers; she had in fact agreed to let her mother adopt Melissa, and was then barred from the family home.

At 18, working in a series of menial jobs, she had a second child, whom she gave up for adoption. She became pregnant again in 1969. 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. She was already five months pregnant. They wished to challenge the law; McCorvey wanted an abortion quickly. She later claimed she had again signed papers that she had not read, not understanding what the case would entail. She was given a pseudonym, Jane Roe, a variation of the John/Jane Doe used for unknowns, and the case was filed against the Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade, previously best-known as the DA in charge of the case against Lee Harvey Oswald.

McCorvey’s baby was born and given up for adoption. The supreme court’s decision, by a 7-2 majority, did not come until January 1973. Justice Harry Blackmun’s opinion, giving women the right of choice, while protecting the state’s interest in preserving life in the later stages of pregnancy, in effect overturned anti-abortion laws in almost all of the 50 states. The landmark decision marked a milestone in women’s rights. McCorvey was living quietly in Dallas with her partner, Connie Gonzalez at the time. 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. 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.

But by the time her autobiography, I Am Roe, written with Andy Meisner, was published in 1994, McCorvey had become a born-again Christian, baptised by the evangelical minister Flip Benham, the head of Operation Rescue, a leading anti-abortion campaigner. She began campaigning fiercely against abortion, claiming she had been a pawn of her Roe v Wade lawyers. “They could have been nice to me instead of treating me like an idiot,” she said.

She also renounced her lesbianism, and, after the publication of her second book, Won By Love, written with Gary Thomas, in 1998, converted once again, this time to Roman Catholicism, under the auspices of Father Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life.

Testifying before the Senate in 1998, she said: “I am dedicated to spending the rest of my life undoing the law that bears my name.” She petitioned the supreme court to undo the Roe v Wade decision, but it rejected her appeal. She protested when Barack Obama spoke at the Roman Catholic University of Notre Dame in 2009, and was arrested at Senate hearings while protesting against the appointment of the pro-choice Sonia Sotomayor to the supreme court. 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. She also played a small role in an independent feature film, Doonby (2013). McCorvey said in her first biography: “I wasn’t the wrong person to become Jane Roe, I wasn’t the right person to become Jane Roe. I was just the person who became Jane Roe.”

She is survived by Melissa; she does not appear to have had any contact with her other two childrne after their adoption.

• Norma Leah McCorvey, campaigner, born 22 September 1947; died 18 February 2017

Norma McCorvey obituary

Norma McCorvey, "Roe" in Roe v Wade case legalizing abortion, dies aged 69

Norma McCorvey, who was just 22 years old when she became better known as Jane Roe in the landmark 1973 supreme court case Roe v Wade, has died aged 69 in her home state of Texas.

Her death was confirmed by journalist Joshua Prager, who was working on a book about McCorvey and was with her and her family when she died. He told the Associated Press that she died of heart failure at an assisted living center in Katy, Texas.

Pregnant and unmarried in 1969, McCorvey sought to terminate a pregnancy that year, setting off a long struggle through the courts that culminated in a legal ruling that would become, and remains, a touchstone for a bitter culture war over reproductive rights.

When McCorvey brought the action, under the pseudonym Jane Roe in 1970, she was simply looking for the right to end a pregnancy she did not wish to bring to term. Three years later, the supreme court handed down its historic 7-to-2 ruling, establishing the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. By the time the ruling was delivered, McCorvey’s baby was 2 ½ years old and had been given up for adoption. She later claimed that she was misled by her lawyers who, she said, used her as a “patsy” to bring about abortion rights.

McCorvey later became a figure­head for both sides of the issue. Initially, she was celebrated by pro-choice campaigners and reviled by anti-abortion activists, and campaigned in the 1980s in support of abortion clinics.

But McCorvey abruptly converted to evangelical Christianity and was baptized in a swimming pool, in front of network TV cameras, by the minister who headed the group Operation Rescue. McCorvey became a fierce opponent of abortion rights, and remained so through her conversion to Catholicism. .

“I’m 100% pro-life,” she told the Associated Press in 1998. “I don’t believe in abortion even in an extreme situation. If the woman is impregnated by a rapist, it’s still a child. You’re not to act as your own God.”

She described herself as the victim of her lawyers, who she claimed used her case to win a larger abortion rights cause. “She felt used by Sarah Weddington [her attorney] and she felt a sense of responsibility that her signature led to the slaughter of millions of children,” said Janet Morana, the executive director of Priests for Life and a longtime friend of McCorvey’s.

Norma McCorvey later became a fierce opponent of abortion rights. Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

McCorvey was involved in a handful of legal challenges to Roe over the years, but the bulk of her activism was with religious groups opposed to Roe.

“Norma found out about Roe v Wade passing by opening her door one morning and seeing the newspaper,” Morana said.“Norma never had an abortion. She gave birth to the Roe baby.”

After her conversion, Morana said, “she used to say, ‘I am Roe no more.’ That was very important to her, that people would understand that she was no longer Roe. She, just yesterday, when I talked to her, she wanted to tell everyone to continue the fight. I take that as a personal mission.”

In 2009, McCorvey was twice arrested for protesting: on one occasion a speech by Barack Obama, and on a second the supreme court nomination hearing of Sonia Sotomayor. McCorvey stopped speaking publicly over the past three years, and in the past year or two her declining health prevented her from attending anti-abortion events.

But her life was never truly settled. She wrote in her autobiography, I Am Roe that, she was a victim of abuse in her childhood in Louisiana and Texas, that she stole money at the age of 10 from a gas station, and that she later struggled with drug and alcohol abuse. Early in her life, she’d been enrolled in a Catholic boarding school and at a reform school for delinquents, and she worked, variously, as a bartender, a maid and a house painter. Her mother told her biographer, Prager, that she’d beaten her daughter over her “wild” behavior.

“She loved life. She loved people. She wanted to make a Texan out of me,” Morana said. “She took me shopping for cowboy boots and hats.”

“I don’t require that much in my life,” McCorvey told the New York Times in 1994. “I just never had the privilege to go into an abortion clinic, lay down and have an abortion. That’s the only thing I never had.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting

Norma McCorvey, "Roe" in Roe v Wade case legalizing abortion, dies aged 69