DALLAS : (WN) Norma McCorvey, whose legal challenge
under the pseudonym "Jane Roe" led to the U.S. Supreme Court's
landmark decision that legalized abortion but who later became an outspoken
opponent of the procedure, died Saturday. She was 69.
McCorvey died at an assisted living center in
Katy, Texas, said journalist Joshua Prager, who is working on a book about
McCorvey and was with her and her family when she died. He said she died of
heart failure and had been ill for some time.
McCorvey was 22, unmarried, unemployed and
pregnant for the third time in 1969 when she sought to have an abortion in
Texas, where the procedure was illegal except to save a woman's life. The
subsequent lawsuit, known as Roe v. Wade, led to the Supreme Court's 1973
ruling that established abortion rights, though by that time, McCorvey had
given birth and given her daughter up for adoption.
Decades later, McCorvey underwent a
conversion, becoming an evangelical Christian and joining the anti-abortion
movement. A short time later, she underwent another religious conversion and
became a Roman Catholic.
"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 told The Associated Press in 1998.
After the court's ruling, McCorvey lived quietly for several years before
revealing herself as Jane Roe in the 1980s. She also confessed to lying when
she said the pregnancy was the result of rape.
Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, she
remained an ardent supporter of abortion rights and worked for a time at a
Dallas women's clinic where abortions were performed.
Her 1994 autobiography, "I Am Roe: My
Life, Roe v. Wade, and Freedom of Choice," included abortion-rights
sentiments along with details about dysfunctional parents, reform school, petty
crime, drug abuse, alcoholism, an abusive husband, an attempted suicide and
lesbianism.
But a year later, she was baptized before
network TV cameras by a most improbable mentor: The Rev. Philip
"Flip" Benham, leader of Operation Rescue, now known as Operation
Save America. McCorvey joined the cause and staff of Benham, who had befriended
her when the anti-abortion group moved next door to the clinic where she was
working.
McCorvey also said her religious conversion
led her to give up her lover, Connie Gonzales. She said the relationship turned
platonic in the early 1990s and that once she became a Christian she believed
homosexuality was wrong.
She recounted her evangelical conversion and
stand against abortion in the January 1998 book "Won by Love," which
ends with McCorvey happily involved with Operation Rescue.But by August of that
year, she had changed faiths to Catholicism and had left Operation Rescue.
Though she was still against abortion, she said she had reservations about the
group's confrontational style.
McCorvey formed her own group, Roe No More
Ministry, in 1997 and traveled around the U.S. speaking out against abortion.
In 2005, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge by McCorvey to the 1973 Roe v.
Wade ruling.
In May 2009, she was arrested on trespassing
charges after joining more than 300 anti-abortion demonstrators when President
Barack Obama spoke at the University of Notre Dame. In July 2009, she was among
demonstrators arrested for disrupting Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court
nomination hearing.
McCorvey was born in Louisiana, spending part
of her childhood in the small village of Lettsworth. Her family then moved to
Houston and later Dallas, where in "I Am Roe" she recounts stealing
money at the age of 10 from the gas station where she worked afternoons and
weekends and running away to Oklahoma City before being returned home by
police.
She was eventually sent to a state reform school for girls in the
northern Texas town of Gainesville, living there from the age of 11 to 15.
She married at the age of 16, but separated
shortly after while she was pregnant. She gave custody of her daughter to her
mother.
She gave a second child up for adoption, but
when she got pregnant a third time she decided to have an abortion. She said
she couldn't afford to travel to one of the handful of states where it would
have been legal.
In "I Am Roe," she said her
adoption attorney put her in touch with Texas lawyers Linda Coffee and Sarah
Weddington, who were seeking a woman to represent in a legal case to challenge
the state's anti-abortion statute. She gave birth to the "Roe" baby
in June 1970.
Her first child, Melissa, was the only one of
the three who was a part of her mother's life, according to journalist Prager.
Melissa was with McCorvey when she died.
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