Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” of the Roe v. Wade decision, recently revealed that her challenge to state laws was based on a lie
McCorvey now says she made up her story of becoming pregnant through being gang raped when she discovered that Texas only allows abortion when the life of the mother is at risk.
In a television documentary aired in the U.S. in September, she said that she was 21 when she became pregnant, “Through what I thought was love.” She was working as a waitress and was too poor to travel to California, at that time the nearest state with legal abortions. “I was very depressed, “ she said. “How dare they tell me that I couldn’t abort a baby that I did not want.”
Although she eventually gave birth to her child who was adopted, she filed suit in a Texas court because “she felt so strongly about a raped women’s right to abortion.” Her case was taken by two recent female law school graduates, one of whom said in a news release issued before the documentary was aired that they thought they had a strong case with a young woman who was a rape victim.
However, the lawyer, Sarah Weddington, said that the rape element was not a part of the case when it went to the Supreme Court, they “only emphasised the question of whether the Constitution gives to the state or leaves to a woman the question of what she can or must do with her body.”
In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court ruled that state laws restricting abortion were unconstitutional. The January 1973 decision legalized abortion in the U.S.
The fact that the key abortion court case was based on a lie is dismissed as irrelevant by pro-abortion activists. Kate Michelman, executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League, told the N.Y. Times that the disclosure “should not cloud the discussion about the right of a woman to terminate her pregnancy.”
“If (sic) she lied, you have to remember that abortions were illegal,” Michelman was on, “and that women were looked down upon if they were pregnant outside of marriage. It was her life circumstances that instigated against her being straightforward about the fact that she was pregnant and wanted to terminate that pregnancy.”
Although McCorvey lived quietly for many years she has recently become active in abortion and feminist groups. In August she appeared at a rally sponsored by the National Organization for Women denouncing the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.
The National Right to Life News said that the documentary “brutally exploited … a deeply flawed, immensely unhappy human being.” She is, the editorial continued, “The product of a broken home, herself divorced, thrice pregnant (twice out of wedlock), as of a year ago living with a female lover. McCorvey is not your customary gung-ho abortion propagandist but obviously a profoundly unhappy woman who is periodically towed out to be milked for all one’s worth by people who could care less about her.”
