The most important aspect of Norma McCorvey’s life was never going to be the most consequential.
As the initially reluctant plaintiff in the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that conflated the right to privacy found in the Constitution with a right for women to abort a child, the Texas woman – who died at age 69 Saturday – later called her work to help make abortion legal the “biggest mistake” in my life.
McCorvey’s change of heart occurred after she became a born-again Christian, but that part of her story was always going to be buried by those who believed the decision liberated women. The Washington Post, for instance, first made a vague reference to her reevaluation in the seventh paragraph of her obituary, and the New York Times made a similar nonspecific reference to it in the fourth paragraph of its recounting of her life.
Years after the 1973 court decision, the Louisiana native outed herself as “Jane Roe” and began to work in the pro-abortion movement. Celebrated by women who were delighted to have a legal “out” for their risky sexual behavior, she even took a job at a Dallas abortion clinic.
That’s where the doubts began to creep in. McCorvey saw abortion being used for birth control, a charge critics had predicted after the Supreme Court decision. She also took in the lack of professional counseling for those women who were ambivalent about whether they really wanted an abortion, a decision many thousands of women then and now regret after the fact.