The Troubled Life & Times of Jane Roe

Today is the Second Anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson, Overturning Roe v. Wade

Jane Roe, of Roe v. Wade fame, was a real person. On the second anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision—which undid Roe v. Wade by saying abortion must be a state decision rather than a federal decision—it is important to realize politics, ultimately, is about real people. And real people are messy, inconsistent, and troubling. Attorneys gave the name Jane Roe to protect the privacy of Norma Nelson (later and better known by her married name as Norma McCorvey). Norma was born in Louisiana in 1947 into a family that later moved to Houston, Texas.

Norma had a horrific childhood. She was arrested for the first time at age 10 for robbing a gas station. She ran away with a girlfriend when she was 13, but since she and her girlfriend were found in a sexually compromising situation in a motel, Norma was removed from her parents. Life at home was horrible for Norma and her brother; their mother was an abusive alcoholic and their father was not around much. So terrible was Norma’s childhood that she recollected that her time in the State School for Girls in Texas (from ages 11 to 15 with some interruptions) was the happiest time of her life. In fact, she so much preferred living at the reformatory that preliminary efforts to release her back to her parents would result in her purposely doing something to get sent back to the school for delinquent girls.

Norma married, became an alcoholic, and had a baby daughter in the 1960s, but the child was removed from the home by Norma’s mother, who tricked Norma into giving the baby up for adoption. Norma was soon pregnant again, but this time she voluntarily gave the child up for adoption. Meanwhile, she left her husband (keeping his last name for the rest of her life) over allegations of violent abuse.

In 1969, Norma was pregnant again. Texas did not allow abortion except in very rare and extreme cases, such as the “rape exception.” Norma fabricated a story that she was raped, but that failed and was exposed as a lie; she then tried to get an illegal abortion, but could not. She tried to travel out of state, but could not afford it. In her efforts, she ran into a physician who referred her to some lawyers who were looking for the perfect test case. The lawyers wanted to find a situation they could use to run a case all the way to the Supreme Court with the goal of launching a national prohibition on any laws in the country that might restrict abortion. Abortion was to be a matter of personal choice and was a private matter between the woman and her doctor.

The problem with this was that it was unconstitutional.

The Constitution gives the federal government only specific authorities known to lawyers as the “enumerated powers.” They’re enumerated because they’re numbered—there are not many of them. Any power not enumerated in the Constitution defaults to the state. Since the Constitution gives the federal government no powers at all with respect to medicine, public health, health care, or abortion, those powers are clearly to be exercised by the state and only the state. The federal government has no Constitutional authority to regulate abortion in any way—not to restrict it or remove restrictions.

Now the great irony in all of this is that Norma Nelson McCorvey never got an abortion. Not one. She had the baby and gave it up. Altogether, Norma McCorvey gave birth to three daughters, all of whom were given up for adoption. In 2021, Shelley Thornton revealed that she was the baby in question of Roe v. Wade. Norma never met Shelley but they spoke on the phone. Norma thought that Shelley ought to thank her for not aborting her. She even said so. Shelley did not see things that way at all—she thought that the mother who conceived her should have cared for her and not rejected her. Shelley said she had always felt unloved and unwanted.

Life is messy.

Norma never attended even one day of the trial based on her sad circumstances. It would be hard to paint her as an activist of any sort. Norma McCorvey’s life was a one-day-at-a-time type struggle.

Then in 1994, a remarkable transformation occurred. She met Flip Benham, a minister and national director of Operation Rescue, a pro-life organization. Norma converted to Evangelical Christianity, quit her work at the abortion clinic, and publicly said she regretted the role she had played in the Roe v. Wade trial. By 1998, Norma became a Catholic (she had previously been Protestant).

In 2004, Norma bravely went back to the Supreme Court in an effort to get Roe v. Wade overturned. (She was sponsored in this effort; she herself was never an activist.) This time, they were not using the constitutional argument, the case argued that evidence showed women were harmed by abortion. In 2005, the Supreme Court dismissed the case with no decision.

The great problem with Norma McCorvey was one she pointed out frequently about herself. The various groups who used her—to take cases to the Supreme Court, to promote the pro-choice side, to promote the pro-life side, to overturn Roe v. Wade, and even to endorse Christianity—probably wished she was a little more demure.  They probably wanted a more articulate, more law-abiding, more clean-cut spokesperson. Despite her name, Norma was never normal. Even on her best day, she was a deeply disturbed woman. Though she never disclosed the full details of her upbringing or parents’ behavior, what she has shared suggests that even as a small child, she was mired in unspeakable torment. There was no denying that she was a criminal, an alcoholic, a prostitute,  a drug dealer, an on-again/off-again lesbian whose longest relationship was with a woman, and she had given birth to three babies, all of whom were adopted (the first two were removed from her custody). She was easy pickings for the smooth-talking lawyers who wanted a national test case for a federal abortion ruling and the fact that she lent her name but never her attention to the case suggests that she really did not have much invested in the abortion argument except as it applied to her at the given moment.

She was a pawn in a much bigger game and she was never really able to assert herself against the powerful forces around her.

Norma Nelson McCorvey died of sudden cardiac arrest in 2017 in the suburbs of Houston. She remains an icon in American jurisprudence but a complicated historical figure. There are conflicting stories about what she believed and when she believed it; she was a spokesperson for pro-choice and pro-life causes. It is likely that Norma was not so much an opportunist as she was an inconsistent woman struggling with ordinary life.

Today marks the second anniversary of the case that corrected the faulty Roe v. Wade decision. Democrats, like Kamala Harris, who are screaming nonstop on social media platforms like X that abortion is banned are promoting a false narrative. Abortion is a matter for states to decide. States can choose to restrict abortion, outlaw it entirely, or permit it in all cases. States like New York, Illinois, and California have some of the most extreme abortion laws on earth. Only North Korea and China have abortion laws on par with those states—and no nation on earth has more extreme abortion laws than those three states. It is hard to see how New York, Illinois, and California could expand abortion laws, unless maybe they wanted to incorporate infanticide.

Other states can legislate as they see fit, and many have changed their abortion laws to be more on par with Europe, which typically allows abortion only early in the pregnancy, usually up to 12 to 16 weeks. Democrats always say they like democracy, but they sure get annoyed when actual people get to vote.