Almost 50 years ago, the US Supreme Court handed down the landmark Roe v Wade ruling securing a woman’s legal right to obtain an abortion.
In the decades since, the ruling has been at the centre of the abortion debate and is now looking likely to be overturned following the leak of an opinion document from the court earlier this month.
The plaintiff at the centre of the case, known by the pseudonym Jane Roe, was Louisiana-born woman Norma McCorvey. Her unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life, but ‘baby Roe’ was in fact born.
Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with McCorvey and her three children up until her death in 2017, and tells her story in his latest book, The Family Roe.
Norma McCorvey (L) with her attorney Gloria Allred outside the Supreme Court in April 1989, where the Court heard arguments in a case that could have overturned the Roe v. Wade decision. Photo: Lorie Shaull
Many assumed that the American woman who won the legal right to abortion had one, Prager tells Kim Hill, but lawsuits often take longer than pregnancies.
Joshua Prager Photo:
Instead, McCorvey gave the child up for adoption – the same as she did for her two previous children.
“She was scarred by those experiences and she didn’t want to go through it again,” Prager says.
“She did not wish to be a mother, she was unfit to be a mother, I uncover how she was a prostitute, she was a drug dealer, she was a drug user, her life was very complicated and difficult.
“But abortion was, in 1969 when she conceived, illegal in Texas and in almost every other state in America. She couldn’t afford to go to where abortion was legal.”
Seeing McCorvey lament over her life, her adoption attorney linked her with another lawyer who was seeking a plaintiff to challenge abortion laws in Texas.
While it was a bit late in McCorvey’s pregnancy, her lawyers did not even try to help her have the abortion, which was all she wanted instead of being part of a big movement, Prager says.
“Norma had nothing to do with the suit, she was completely aloof from it, removed from it.
“Once she signed the affidavit and became the plaintiff, she sort of was forgotten by history and by her lawyers and they pushed the case forward on her behalf, they then made it a class action suit so they were suing Texas on behalf of all women ‘similarly situated’.”
Later on, in the mid to late ‘80s, McCorvey wanted a seat at the table, but she was marginalised by the movement, he says.
The book cover of The Family Roe by Joshua Prager. Photo: Supplied
“In fairness to them, Norma was an unreliable narrator to her own life story, she made up certain stories et cetera, but they absolutely could’ve helped her to be part of their fight and they didn’t really want her there.
“That fact was largely responsible for the fact in 1995, Norma then switched to the other side, became a born-again Christian and then went to fight against Roe v Wade for the pro-life side… They gave her love and attention that she didn’t get on the pro-choice side.”
McCorvey’s two autobiographies were both “beyond unreliable”, Prager says.
“What she was doing was reimagining herself not a sinner, meaning someone who wanted to have abortion or someone who had sex outside of marriage or someone who didn’t want to be a mother, but rather as a victim.
“And the truth of the matter was she was a victim, she was a victim not in those dramatic ways but rather in the sense that she simply wanted to have an abortion and was not able to and that one inarguable trauma was really enough to redirect her entire life.”
There was tension between McCorvey and her third child, Shelly, because after tracking her down, she later told her in phone conversations she should be thankful she was not aborted, he says.
Shelly told Prager her biggest affliction was being born unwanted, which he says brings into question the argument that having an abortion is emotionally scarring while adoption is not.
“Despite all she endured, being ‘Roe baby’ and also having been scalded by those conversations with Norma, she nonetheless felt for Norma, and at the end of Norma’s life, she felt bad for her having had her life defined by abortion and Roe v Wade.
“What you see is on a very human level if a person wished to have abortion but is not able to, that is a very difficult and scarring thing for both the mother and the child.”
But Shelly never saw her on her deathbed.
“She said at the time, when I was speaking with her a few days before Norma died, the she would probably regret that for the rest of her life, she was very open about that, and yet she said ‘I’m not the one who owes Norma an apology, Norma owes me an apology’. So they never did reconcile.”
But Shelly was happy to find her sisters, who all said they just wanted to be their own people and stop the patterns of behaviour from previous generations that led to unwanted pregnancies, he says.
“I then brought all three of them together, they all had sort of looked for each other in vain, and it was a very moving coming together.
Feminist Norma McCorvey aka Jane Roe, the woman behind Roe V. Wade case, hugging her 23 year old daughter, Cheryl while holding her baby granddaughter outside at hotel. Photo: Mark Perlstein/Getty Images
“Norma represented tens of millions of people on both sides of the issue but at the end of her life, she was entirely alone, except for Melissa [her first-born], Melissa was there with her partner and her daughters and that was very, very moving.”
Leaders on both sides of the movement have politicised abortion and are largely to blame for America’s polarisation on the issue, he says.
“In our country, abortion is really grounds for a civil war and I wrote about people on both sides of the issue and wrote about abortion through people, not politics.
“Just to give an example of the pro-choice side, when president Clinton spoke of abortion, he said that it ought to be something safe, legal, and rare. And the people nowadays will say ‘well why rare? It shouldn’t be rare at all, it’s only a social and moral good, it only empowers women’, so they are far more extreme than they used to be.
“Similarly, on the pro-life side, once upon a time it would’ve been unheard of for the leaders of this movement to say that abortion ought to be illegal even in cases of rape and incest.
“So our country has become truly divided and polarised and as divided as it is, it’s going to be even more divided right after Roe is likely overturned.”
