The truth about “Jane Roe”, author of the right to abortion in the United States who then changed sides

“Her name is Jane Roe and she will be in the history books.” With that sentence, Melissa Mills began to understand who was his mother, and now tries to explain the complex evolution of a woman who helped legalize abortion in the United States and got involved in the movement to abolish that right; a right that the Supreme Court repealed this Friday.

In her first interview with a medium in Spanish, Norma McCorvey’s eldest daughter claims the legacy of her mother, whose request under the pseudonym “Jane Roe” led to the Supreme Court decision in 1973 which protected the right to abortion throughout the United States.

“She gave up many things to fight for women’s rights,” Mills points out in a video conference with Efe from her Katy, Texas home before the court overturned that historic ruling.

His mother died in 2017 in the same town where Mills now assures, without a shadow of a doubt, that McCorvey would have felt “devastated” had he known that the Supreme Court was about to issue a ruling that clearly overturns the precedent that has been in existence for half a centuryknown as “Roe vs. Wade”.

The truth about Jane Roe

At first glance, this is not a surprising statement: his mother was the architect of that historic sentence, the young woman who, pregnant against her will in a state where abortion was illegal, he allowed two female lawyers to use his case protect the rights of millions of women in the country.

But in 1995, McCorvey passed to the other side. An evangelical pastor moved next door to the abortion clinic where he worked in Dallas and, within a few months, got him into the organization Operation Rescue anti-abortionistknown for harassing the doctors who practiced that service.

At the end of her life, McCorvey assured in the documentary “AKA Jane Roe” that her activism in the anti-abortion movement it was a simple “performance”: “I took their money and they put me in front of the cameras and they ordered me what to say”he confessed.

When asked about it, his daughter shakes her head. The conversion of “Jane Roe” to anti-abortion was “genuine”, ensures. Yes, she received a “salary”, but her message in the documentary was mostly born out of the “pain” that she, “when she really got sick”, conservative activists they will put it aside.

“This hurt him a lot. They no longer needed herThey could no longer get anything else from her. It felt like she had been left to her fate, ”Mills recalls.

To explain his mother’s Copernican turn in the mid-1990s, Mills cites two factors: McCorvey’s troubled childhood, raised as a “Jehovah’s Witness”and the “depression” engendered by her “Jane Roe” identity being made public.

“People told him he was the devilresponsible for the deaths of 60 million children, “he recalls.

After all, Mills acknowledges, what her mother was looking for can be summed up in one word: love.

A life of “pain and anger”

Norma Leah Nelson – McCorvey’s maiden name – born in 1947 in a poor family in rural Louisianaand his childhood was a whirlwind: his the mother was an alcoholic and mistreated her, and soon her father abandoned them. It was an environment of “pain and anger”, he recounted in her first autobiography, “I am roe deer” (1994).

At just 10, Norma stole money from a gas station to escape with a friend to Oklahoma. They put it inside a Catholic collegewhere she said she was sexually abused and then sent to a friend of her family, who he raped her almost every day for one month.

Those experiences made her a “tough” woman, very suspicious of people, with a free and “erratic” spirit, according to her daughter.

She was only 15 when she married Mills’ father, a man named Woody McCorvey who he beat her when he found out she was pregnant. She fled to her mother’s house and confessed that although she had slept with a man, she was a lesbian.

The little girl ended up in the custody of her grandmother, while the future “Jane Roe” he immersed himself in alcohol and drugs.

“Norma was in and out of my life. For a long time I thought she was my sister, because I only saw her sometimes: at parties, on birthdays …” Mills says.

At one of those parties, someone told him for the first time his mother was “Jane Roe”but it would take years to figure out “what that meant”.

Mills was the only one of McCorvey’s three daughters who really knew her mother. In 1967 Norma had another girlfriend, Jennifer, whom she gave up for adoption; Y in 1969 the pregnancy of the “baby Roe” arrives.

McCorvey didn’t want to relive the same thing. abortion was illegal in Texas, but tried: unsuccessfully asked his gynecologist and went to a clandestine clinic where the police had just searched her. She was desperate, she called an adoption lawyer, who gave her the name of another lawyer, Linda Coffee.

Together with his partner Sarah Weddington, Coffee took McCorvey’s case to the Supreme Court, which issued its historic ruling in 1973. Decades later, Norma allegedly complained in an interview that she was being treated like a “pawn”. What she wanted was an abortion, and the dispute lasted so long that she had to have her third child and give it up for adoption.

“Absorbed” by the evangelicals

the feminist movement I’ve never felt comfortable with McCorvey, but it made a hole. She went to demonstrations, created a foundation, volunteered in abortion clinics … until she was “swallowed” on the other side, in Mills’ words.

“He had an addictive personality, and that type of people ends up in very extreme things. They like chaos, they like drama, “he points out.

Her evangelical mentors, who baptized her in a swimming pool, alienated her from a fundamental part of her identity: her sexual orientation. McCorvey lived another two decades with his girlfriend, Connie González, but all physical contact between them ended. In 2006, Norma even burned the flag LGBT in a demonstration.

Eventually McCorvey it didn’t fit exactly neither on the side that defends the right to abortion nor on the side that is firmly opposed to it. Mills – who belongs to the former camp – likes to call her mother “pro-woman”: one who believed in it the right to decide about pregnancy in many cases, but she didn’t want it to be “abused”.

“I think his legacy will last a lot longer than any of us, and he’ll be remembered a lot longer than any of us,” says Mills. And that was probably all McCorvey wanted.

The author is an EFE journalist

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