Norma McCorvey, who was the anonymous plaintiff known as “Jane Roe” in the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade died on Saturday morning of heart failure. McCorvey, who was at an assisted-living facility when she died, was at the center of the ruling that ended up legalizing abortion in the United States and shaped the debate over one of the most divisive issues in American politics. McCorvey came forward in the 1980s to become a strong voice in the pro-choice movement. But later she switched sides after becoming a born-again Christian and became one of the most high-profile pro-life activists.
Even though she was in the public eye for decades and wrote two memoirs “she remained an enigma, as difficult to know as when she shielded her identity behind the name Jane Roe,” notes the Washington Post. Although it has long been said that McCorvey remained anonymous for years that wasn’t entirely true, wrote Joshua Prager in a 2013 profile published in Vanity Fair. McCorvey did identify herself shortly after the decision but ended up living in relative obscurity until more than a decade later.
“I’m a simple woman with a ninth grade education who wants women to not be harassed or condemned,” she told the New York Times in 1994. “I just wanted the privilege of a clean clinic to get the procedure done. … 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.”
A year after she published I am Roe, detailing her role in the pro-choice movement, McCorvey had a very high-profile change of heart and said she would dedicate her life to reversing the Supreme Court decision that bore her fictitious name. She then wrote another memoir, Won By Love, and became a regular participant in antiabortion protests.
Years later, McCorvey appeared in a Florida ad paid for by the founder of Operation Rescue. “Do not vote for Barack Obama,” McCorvey says in the ad as horrific images flash on the screen. “He murders babies.”
