This is the true story behind Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that effectively legalized abortion through all nine months in the United States.
The real name of “Jane Roe” was Norma McCorvey. In 1969, McCorvey was a young single woman in Dallas, Texas, who was poor and regularly abusing drugs and alcohol. She was also pregnant with her third child.
She had surrendered custody of her first child to her mother and placed her second child for adoption. With her third child, the 21-year-old sought an abortion, but abortion was illegal in Texas at the time.
Abortion was only legal in a handful of states like California and New York. However, McCorvey didn’t have the means to travel to one of those states.
Based on advice from others, McCorvey even began to lie that she’d become pregnant from a gang rape in hopes that it would make it easier to obtain an abortion. It didn’t.
McCorvey became the target of two young and ambitious lawyers. They were recently out of school and wanted to change the abortion laws in America: Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee.
They took McCorvey out to lunch when she was five months pregnant, drank beers with her, got her kinda smashed, and convinced her to agree to file suit to challenge the abortion laws in Texas. Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade would represent the state as defendant.
Weddington would later admit to using McCorvey for her own ambitions to challenge abortion laws. She said that McCorvey was just a vehicle for presenting larger issues and that all Jane Roe did was sign a one-page affidavit.
She was pregnant and didn’t want to be; that was her total involvement in the case. In fact, Weddington said that if she had to do it over again, she wouldn’t even use McCorvey as the plaintiff.
Weddington and Coffee kept McCorvey completely out of the loop when planning their case, and McCorvey didn’t even attend a single trial hearing. If Weddington really wanted to get McCorvey an abortion, she could have, as she was heavily involved in an abortion referral network in Texas.
Weddington had the resources but she never mentioned this to McCorvey because, apparently, that would mean losing the only plaintiff that she had with the necessary legal standing to challenge the law.
How ironic that Weddington championed abortion access for all women by secretly withholding an abortion from her own client. So, during the trial proceedings, McCorvey gave birth to a baby girl and placed her for adoption.
That’s right, Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade never even had an abortion. McCorvey became a poster child for the abortion movement while never having an abortion herself.
A three-judge panel in Texas ruled in Weddington and Coffee’s favor, but the state immediately appealed, and Roe v. Wade made its way up to the Supreme Court. In 1973, the Supreme Court handed down their ruling, along with another abortion case, Doe v. Bolton.
The real name of “Mary Doe” in Doe v. Bolton was Sandra Cano. She was a poor 22-year-old mother of three in Georgia.
After she became pregnant with her fourth child, Cano met with a lawyer named Margie Pitts Hames seeking legal help to get custody of her children in foster care and then to divorce her husband.
Despite the fact that Hames filed suit on Cano ‘s behalf to obtain an abortion, Cano maintained that she never wanted an abortion at all. She said it was not her signature on any documents agreeing to one.
She says that Hames forged her signature on the abortion documents or that Hames slipped it into the papers she thought she was signing regarding the divorce and sole custody. Like McCorvey, Cano also never appeared in court after her initial court hearing.
When she found out that Hames was seeking an abortion for her, she fled to Oklahoma to save her baby. The lawsuit filed against Georgia Attorney General Arthur Bolton challenged Georgia’s law permitting abortion only in cases of rape, severe fetal deformity, or threat to the mother.
A three-judge panel district court declared portions of the Georgia law unconstitutional, and the case made its way to the Supreme Court to be decided along with Roe v. Wade.
The decision to legalize abortions in Roe v. Wade was a seven to two ruling by nine men. Writing the majority decision, Justice Harry Blackmun invented a legal framework based on an arbitrary three-trimester measurement of pregnancy.
This was not based on a medical understanding of pregnancy or fetal development, but it was simply a tool to justify abortion during different times of pregnancy. According to Roe, during the first trimester, abortion could not be restricted.
During the second trimester, restrictions could be made for so-called health reasons, and during the third trimester, abortions could be restricted entirely so long as the laws contained exceptions for cases when they claimed it was necessary to save the life or health of the mother. But Doe v. Bolton defined health so broadly as to include physical, emotional, psychological, familial health, and the woman’s age.
Basically, any justification for a third-trimester abortion could fall under such a health exception. Today, America is one of only seven nations worldwide that allows abortion for any reason through all nine months of pregnancy.
The stories of the two women have startling similarities. Both were poor and struggling, both were lied to and preyed upon and neither of them had an abortion.
Both McCorvey and Cano would become passionate pro-life activists. However, McCorvey would denounce the authenticity of her pro-life stance on her deathbed.
“I think it was a mutual thing. You know, I took their money and they put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say. And that’s what I’d say.” McCorvey would say when asked if the pro-lifers thought she exploited them.
When all was said and done, both sides of the abortion debate were exposed as having selfishly used these two women.
