In the film, she claims that she only campaigned for anti-abortion groups, including Operation Rescue which is now known as Operation Save America, because they were paying her. During the course of the lawsuit, McCorvey gave birth and placed the baby for adoption. Opposition to abortion turned political, then partisan; the National Right to Life Committee declared the GOP the party of life. Politicians conformedRichard Nixon and Ronald Reagan turned pro-life, Ted Kennedy and Al Gore pro-choice. A name that often evokes sadness. 10 Important Events in Norma McCorvey's Life 1. "In truth, McCorvey has long been less pro-choice or pro-life than pro-Norma," said the author of the Vanity Fair story Joshua Prager. As a result of McCorveys lie, more than 20 million babies have been aborted, Jack Nunn, of Ridgeway, Virginia, wrote to the Greensboro News & Record. In 1991, Thornton became pregnant and did not have an abortion because abortion was "not part of who I was". At the age of 10, Norma robbed the till at a gas station and ran away with a girlfriend. McCorvey is dead, and AKA Jane Roe frames itself as her final. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. A black-and-white photograph of McCorveya girl of seven in cats-eye glasses crouched beside a German shepherd on a dirt roadstood in a frame. McCorveys lawyers had never mentioned an alleged rape in court, and it formed no part of their legal argument. Norma McCorvey (left), the plaintiff in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case, with her attorney, Gloria Allred, outside the Supreme Court in April 1989, when the court heard arguments in a case that could. But I know at the end of her life, she did not believe that."[44]. She described this as the happiest time of her life. Her eyes were light blue and cloudy, her white hair pulled back in a braid. When McCorvey's mother found out, her cousin said McCorvey was lying. A lawsuit. A few years later, according to a document in her files, McCorvey indicated that she was receiving a salary of $40,000 annually from Roe No More Ministries. Wild.. Her mother, Mary, was physically abusive. According to I Am Roe, McCorvey was 15 when one night, while working as a roller-skating carhop, she drove off with a male customer in a black Ford who had ordered a furburger. The man was Elwood Woody McCorvey, a 21-year-old sheet-metal worker. It was Roe v. Roe. Fridays decision arrives at a time when a signfiicant majority of Americans support abortion rights. Jane Roe, the anonymous plaintiff in the Roe v Wade case by which the US supreme court legalised abortion, became an icon for feminism. Connie Gonzalez, a fellow Planned Parenthood employee and McCorvey's longtime lover until her conversion, has a different perspective: She says Benham was a charming phony who was nice to people . However, the papers she had signed were adoption papers, giving her mother custody of Melissa, and McCorvey was then kicked out of the house. It was as though the great trauma McCorvey did inarguably suffer was not enough, namely that owing to the law, she had been forced to give birth to a child she did not want. In 1988, she sought money too, teaming up with a lawyer, advertising executive, and businesswoman in Texas to produce and promote a document of historic and social importance. They intended to print up 1,000 copies of the first page of the Supreme Courts Roe decision, which McCorvey would then sign. I felt like I was high. [6] Soon after, she began identifying as a lesbian. Thats what Id say, she said. Unable to obtain an abortion, she gave birth to a baby girl on June 2, 1970. Children are a miraclea gift from God!. Passed by a majority of 6-to-3, the courts ruling on Dobbs v. Jacksons Womens Health Organization arrives just under two months after the leak of a draft majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito. McCorvey saved copies of the homily. McCorvey gained notoriety with the help of evangelical Christian leaders like Operation Rescues founders the Rev Flip Benham and the Rev Rob Schenck. McCorvey has often seemed more comfortable with foes than with allies; she has many times fired and rehired her current lawyer, Allan Parker, no matter that he works for her pro bono. And, she says, evangelical religion provided Norma with something the pro-choice movement could not: the comfort of absolute truth. Her family moved to Texas when she was young. [41][42], Robert Schenck, a formerly anti-abortion evangelical pastor who worked with McCorvey, verified the claim made in the documentary of McCorvey receiving financial compensation. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Her mother, Mildred, known as Mary, an alcoholic, moved Norma and her brother, James, to Houston, Texas. McCorvey was in a relationship with Connie Gonzalez (some publications have spelled her name Gonzales) for decades. [5], McCorvey was born in Simmesport, Louisiana,[6] and spent her early childhood at her family's residence in Lettsworth in Pointe Coupee Parish. They turned to politics, campaigning for human life amendments to kill Roe at its legal root. Seated in a folding chair outside her home, Gonzalez puffed on a cigarette and maintained flatly that the shooting had never occurred. But then, she exhibited few symptoms. She was already five months pregnant. McCorvey's life had been hard. In June 2010, Connie Gonzalez sat smoking Marlboro Lights outside the home on Cactus Lane, in Dallas, where she had lived for some 35 years with Norma McCorvey. When they lost the house, Gonzalez moved with Linda to the Dallas home of another niece. Norma was made a ward of the court and sent to state institutions. When, in 1973, she made a list in her red plastic datebook of the important events of that year, she included the Texas State Fair, the closing of a local theater, and the 4th Arab-Israili War, but did not take note of the Supreme Court ruling that would inform the rest of her life. [45], Pavone, who had a decades long association with McCorvey, said that she was not on the payroll of his organization, Priests for Life, and said that he did not believe that McCorvey's activism was disingenuous saying, "I can even see her being emotionally cornered to get those words out of her mouth, but the things that I saw in 22 years with herthe thousands and thousands of conversations that we hadthat was real. There was something else in it for McCorvey, something practical. In her book, she stated that she went on a weekend trip to visit two friends and left her baby with her mother. On the day McCorvey finally revealed her role in the case, She picked up the newspaper, twiddling her thumbs real nervous, Gonzalez told the New York Times Alex Witchel. Norma McCorvey spent most of her life as a symbol. After first claiming she had been gang-raped, thinking that might get her a legal abortion, and seeking an illegal one as well, she visited the Dallas lawyers Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee. McCorvey vowed to do things differently. In L.A., Allred also arranged for McCorvey to get lessons in public speaking. Born-again. In September 1969, the month she turned 22, McCorvey became pregnant for a third time. Pro-life. . [13] She voiced remorse for her part in the Supreme Court decision and said she had been a pawn for abortion activists. She referred with contempt to her daughters sexual activity (She was a die-hard whore), which was primarily but not exclusively lesbian from a young age. Early in February 2017, Norma McCorvey the famed plaintiff "Jane Roe" in monumental U.S. Supreme Court abortion rights case Roe v. Wade was near death. I was just the person who became Jane Roe, of Roe v. Wade. The truth is sadder and less tidy. In May of 1969, months before meeting Norma McCorvey, McCluskey filed a suit taking aim at an anti-sodomy law in Texas. In 1970, when McCorvey was five months pregnant, she signed an affidavit that she later claimed to have never read. She had a thin nose and thin lips, an oval face with a high forehead and sunken chin, a poof of thick brown hair, and a voice loud and husky. She told her birth mother that she "would never, ever thank her for not aborting me". Holly Hunter would win an Emmy for playing McCorvey (renamed Ellen Russell) in Roe vs. Wade, an NBC television movie that aired the following month. By 2021, she had met her two half-siblings, but not her birth mother. Pro-life activists were exultant. At 16 she left school and was working as a waitress when she met and married a sheet-metal worker, Woody McCorvey. Her parents, Olin and Mary Nelson, had pledged themselves to Jehovah when she was a girl, and McCorvey and her brother had knocked on doors in east Texas with religious literature, hocking thou shalt notsabortion among them. McCorvey thus became, ironically, a symbol of the right to a procedure that she herself never underwent. She was wild. Do not vote for Barack Obama, McCorvey said against a background of images of aborted fetuses. Norma McCorvey Took the Money of the Anti-Abortion Movement and Lost Herself. But it also helped to turn abortion into the great foe of American consensus. [4] However, in the Nick Sweeney documentary AKA Jane Roe, McCorvey said, in what she called her "deathbed confession", that "she never really supported the antiabortion movement" and that she had been paid for her anti-abortion sentiments. But at age 79 she remained big and sturdy, a colossus in white sneakers and blue jeans and an aqua shirt that read grits: girls raised in the south. In 1967, at age 19, she became pregnant for a second time. McCorvey, under the pseudonym Jane Roe, had brought the precipitating lawsuit in 1970, when she was pregnant for a third time and living in Texas, where abortion was prohibited unless the life of the pregnant woman was threatened. By the time the court ruled on Roe, McCorveys pregnancy had long since ended. The religious right worked to convince McCorvey that abortion was the great defining evil of our time. I was a woman alone with no place to go and no job, McCorvey told the Southern Baptist Convention news service in 1973. By then, notes Joshua Prager for the Atlantic, she and Coffee had made Roe into a class-action suit demonstrating the case for the constitutional right of all Americans to determine the path of their own lives. No one wanted to hire a pregnant woman. Justice Harry Blackmuns opinion, giving women the right of choice, while protecting the states interest in preserving life in the later stages of pregnancy, in effect overturned anti-abortion laws in almost all of the 50 states. According to McCorvey, friends advised her that she should assert falsely that she had been raped by a group of black men and that she could thereby obtain a legal abortion under Texas's law, which prohibited most abortion; sources differ over whether Texas law had such a rape exception. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. It stars John Schneider, best known for The Dukes of Hazzard, who is a born-again Christian. Dr. Lane suggested that McCorvey consult an adoption lawyer in Dallas named Henry McCluskey, with whom he had a long-standing arrangement. Connie was born June 9, 1934 to Alberto and Lupe Alaniz. After converting to Catholicism, McCorvey continued to live with Gonzalez, though she described their relationship as platonic. It is a spring night in rural Texas, and crickets sing as a woman in her 60s with broad shoulders and short brown hair stops a pregnant young woman on an empty sidewalk. I was good at it, too.. Aug. 12, 1995 Norma (Jane Roe) McCorvey's sudden conversion from abortion- rights symbol to new darling of the anti-abortion movement may have shocked pro-choice leaders across the nation, but. She also renounced her lesbianism, and, after the publication of her second book, Won By Love, written with Gary Thomas, in 1998, converted once again, this time to Roman Catholicism, under the auspices of Father Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life. Included in the documentary also are scenes from the presidential election night in 2016, depicting McCorveys disappointment as Democrat Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. Religion fell in line, too. And I said, That's fantastic. And she said, But youre a Catholic. And I said, So what? As individuals across the country reckon with the prospectof a post-Roe America, the story of the court case that first codified the constitutional right to an abortion is making headlines once again. Connie Gonzalez Neither side of abortion debate emerges well from McCorvey story Norma McCorvey, aka Jane Roe of Roe v Wade was exploited by elements of both sides Obituary: Norma. When, two years later, President Gerald Ford nominated John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court, Roe was not even mentioned during his confirmation hearings. The ministry was the interface that handled Norma's speaking engagements and therefore groups would pay to that ministry for airline . [6] They lived together in Dallas for 35 years. When she returned, her mother replaced Melissa with a baby doll and reported Norma to the police as having abandoned her baby, and called the police to take her out of the house. Dubbed Roe v. Wade, the lawsuit anonymized McCorvey as Jane Roe; the second half of its name refers to the defendant, Henry Wade, the district attorney charged with enforcing Texas abortion laws. The pair cleaned apartments for a living and had an active social life. She wore the jeans, says Taylor, if a customer was girly, the dress if she was a cute butch. Norma continued to have relationships with men too. Approached last fall at another facility, in Dallas, she clutched the silver arms of a wheelchair with her hands, veins prominent under slack skin. Published by Dallas Morning News on Jul. She got to know she is right, says Taft. McCorvey and Gonzalez had wrangled over money after their split, and a bank was about to foreclose on the property. And although she spent most of her nights in the numb comfort of lesbian bars, McCorvey found herself, at 22, single and pregnant for a third time. In January of 1970, after Norma came to see him, McCluskey returned Coffees favor by calling her with a tip. I was just the person who became Jane Roe.. She also played a small role in an independent feature film, Doonby (2013). In her 1994 memoir I Am Roe, McCorvey offered a less cynical view of her place in the fight for reproductive rights. She was decried as a baby-killer and faced death-threats, but she still spoke at a massive pro-choice Washington rally in 1989, the same year Holly Hunter won an Emmy playing her in a television film. Only a few hours before they spoke on the phone with Fr Frank Pavone, Norma's friend of 25 years. Everybody had to pick up the pieces. In 1998, McCorvey redefined herself yet again, converting to Roman Catholicism after instruction by Fr. [15][17], On May 22, 2020, a documentary titled AKA Jane Roe aired on FX, describing McCorvey's life and the financial incentives to change her views on abortion. As Way recalls it, the two of them talked over a plate of fried zucchini, and McCorvey lamented the place she has come to occupy in the vast constellation of abortion activism, pro and con. Then she underwent a Damascene conversion and became an equally iconic anti-abortion campaigner. Cookie Policy For years she also maintained publicly that the Roe pregnancy was the result of . And she has played Jane Roe every which way, venturing far from the original script to wring a living from the issue that has come to define her existence. Roe v. Wade was a watershed legal ruling. [13], While working at a restaurant, Norma met Woody McCorvey (born 1940), and she married him at the age of 16 in 1963. As Coffee told a reporter in 1983, It had to be a pregnant woman wanting to get an abortion. After decades of keeping her . From the New York Times - May 22, 2020 By Michelle Goldberg , Opinion Columnist In 2006, I went to Jackson, Miss., to report on the weeklong siege of the state's last abortion clinic by the anti-abortion group Operation Save America. He beat her, before and after she became pregnant. At a book signing, McCorvey was befriended by Flip Benham, an evangelical minister and the national director of the anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue. Though by now six months pregnant, McCorvey held on to the hope, she later wrote, that she might be the first girl in Texas to get a legal abortion. Meanwhile, Coffee and Weddington amended Roe to make it a class-action suit, ensuring that any ruling would apply to all women in Texas. Constitutionally speaking, McCorveys admission was an irrelevance. The district court ruled in the pairs favor but dismissed their request to stop enforcing the states old abortion laws, leading both Wade and McCorveys team to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. She was given a pseudonym, Jane Roe, a variation of the John/Jane Doe used for unknowns, and the case was filed against the Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade, previously best-known as the DA in charge of the case against Lee Harvey Oswald. In a documentary that is premiering on Friday and is already making waves, McCorvey admits that her infamous reversal on abortion rights was all an act. Todays final opinion, also by Alito, closely echoes the leaked draft, arguing that the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives.. In McCorveys telling, the story is a morality tale with a simple arc: An unwanted pregnancy. Norma McCorvey, who was 22, unwed, mired in addiction and poverty, and desperate for a way out of an unwanted pregnancy when she became Jane Roe, the pseudonymous plaintiff of the 1973 U.S.. (The house had recently been appraised at roughly $80,000.) And although she spent most of her nights in the numb comfort of lesbian. McCorvey's father, Olin Nelson, a TV repairman, left the family when McCorvey was 13 years old, and her parents subsequently divorced. And after Justices Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist replaced the retiring justices Hugo Black and John Harlan, oral arguments were heard again, the following October. Norma Leah Nelson was born on September 22, 1947, in Simmesport, Louisiana. And my life story, warts and all, was a little piece of history., Meilan Solly I took their money and they'd put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say. Here are his 1943 certificate of birth, his 1955 certificate of baptism from a Baptist church, his 1965 law degree from Baylor Law School, and his 1973 report of death. The movie, tentatively set to be released this year, is directed by Peter Mackenzie, a Catholic filmmaker from Britain. Mary now suffers from dementia. DALLAS - 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. She had another realization there too: Sex was not profane. She is not a professional actress. Weddington, for her part, had had firsthand experience with abortion laws in Texas, having felt compelled to go to Mexico for an abortion during law school. That said, McCorveys account of her post-decision conversation with Coffee is simply not true: McCorvey had delivered her third child even before the three-judge panel handed down its ruling. The conservative film Roe v. Wade, starring Jon Voight and Stacey Dash depicted McCorveys conversion in the famous case of the same name. The documentary, AKA JANE ROE, features interviews with McCorvey, who says, "I took their money, and they'd put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say. Norma has never been able to do the right thing, says her daughter, Melissa. They begin with the photocopied birth certificate of Norma Lea Nelson, born in Simmesport, Louisiana, on September 22, 1947four ounces shy of seven pounds. People in Normas corner were upset, too. McCorvey was 22 and pregnant for the third time when in 1969 she sought an abortion, then illegal under Texas law except when necessary to save the mother's life. I felt there was no one in the world who could help me., Out of options, McCorvey turned to Dallas lawyers Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, who were in search of the perfect plaintiff for their attempt to challenge Texas abortion laws. Whereas in 1976, the Southern Baptist Convention supported most abortions, it opposed most abortions in 1980. I live, eat, breathe, think everything about abortion., In the spring of 1995, McCorvey was working at a Dallas womens clinic on Markville Drive called A Choice for Women when Operation Rescue, a Christian group devoted to making abortion illegal, moved in next door. She is survived by Melissa; she does not appear to have had any contact with her other two children after their adoption. Norma McCorvey, the Jane Roe of the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion, died Saturday outside Houston at age 69. In speech after speech, her event objectives, as she was instructed in 1998 for a speech at a Christian pregnancy center in South Carolina, were twofold: Glorify God in all we do. In early 1970, McCorvey sought an abortion, telling the doctor to whom she went that she had become pregnant as a result of a rape. Johnson said that she believed McCorvey was a damaged woman who should not have been thrust into the spotlight so quickly after turning against abortion saying, "I don't have any problem believing that in the last year of her life that she tried to convince herself abortion was OK. Coffee filed Roe v. Wade at the Dallas federal district courthouse on March 3, 1970. I was just a pawn, and I wasn't going to let her do it," she . Its purpose, according to a New York Times account, was to help poor Texas women obtain legal abortions., On April 5, 1989, McCorvey made news again, telling reporters that she and Gonzalez had been shot at in their Dallas home. Norma was soon gone as welloff to a Catholic boarding school and then, after minor brushes with the law, briefly to a reform school. Norma McCorvey was a part-Cajun high school dropout who grew up a Jehovah's Witness in Louisiana and Texas. The pair began dating, and soon afterward McCorvey moved in with Gonzalez. The two flew there together. And long after the Supreme Court, in 1973, granted it (and all American women) the right to an abortion free of interference by the State, McCorvey lived off her pseudonymous self, first as a pro-choice advocate and thenafter an evangelical minister named Flip baptized her in a Texas swimming poolas a professional pro-lifer. [T]he partisan divide on abortion is far wider than it was two decades ago, notes Pews Hannah Hartig in a blog post. Barbara is unsure how the men knew each other but says that, because both were gay, her father asked the local papers not to insinuate that they had been lovers. Still, there remains the big temptation on the pro-life side to view this person as a trophy, says Pavone. An unwanted pregnancy had become a career. I never go anywhere w/o Ms. Connie, she wrote to a Catholic organization that had invited her to speak in New Zealand in 2000. I Am Roe was well received. Norma Leah Nelson McCorvey (September 22, 1947 - February 18, 2017), also known by the pseudonym "Jane Roe", was the plaintiff in the landmark American legal case Roe v. . Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's associate digital editor, history. Three months later, in January 1973, the justices handed down the decision that has altered Americas political landscape. Rather, Allred told a reporter for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner later that year, the funds had gone directly to McCorvey; the amount was never disclosed. In September 1969, 21-year-old McCorvey became pregnant for the third time. At age 22 mired in poverty, a survivor of childhood abuse, and pregnant against her will for the third time she became Jane Roe: the anonymous plaintiff at the center of Roe v. Wade, an emblem of the cruelty of America's abortion bans, whose case eventually enshrined the right to choose into the constitution. McCorvey stated that she was only interested in an abortion, but agreed to meet with McCluskey. Hers was not a happy household. . But laws in her home state of Texas were highly restrictive, only allowing abortions if carrying the fetus to term threatened the mothers health. McCorveys lawyers filed the case at a federal district courthouse in Dallas on March 3, 1970. She appeared to be the perfect plaintiff in a case that changed Americas political landscape: Rupert Murdoch Colluded With Jared Kushner to Try to Throw the 2020 Election to Trump Because Of Course He Did, Trump Claims Ron DeSantis Gets Off on Killing Old People in Wheelchairs, Fuck Biden, Dont Tread on Me, and a Wisconsin Death Trip for Our Times. Rearguments took place on October 11, 1972, and the court issued its ruling on January 22, 1973, effectively legalizing abortion across the U.S. by a 7-to-2 majority. Frank Pavone of the organization Priests for Life. [2], Later in her life, McCorvey became an Evangelical Protestant and in her remaining years, a Roman Catholic, and took part in the anti-abortion movement. [33], McCorvey remained active in anti-abortion demonstrations, including one she participated in before President Barack Obama's commencement address to the graduates of the University of Notre Dame. (Say Versus rather than V. Abortion instead of It. If youre asked a three-part question, answer the one you like best.). It was a game. Reception to follow. The author knocks on the doors bearing the darkest symbols, behind which lie guns, ammo, antisemitism, antiabortion dogmaand a belief in the coming civil war. He is writing a book about Roe v. Wade. Rosary and Mass will be on Friday, March 18 at 10 a.m., graveside at noon . A memorial mass will be held 7/10/2015 at St. Monica Catholic Church at 11:00am. [21][22] She attempted to obtain an illegal abortion, but the recommended clinic had been closed down by authorities. Shelley Lynn Thornton has said she has no regrets about not meeting her biological mother. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. She gave her baby girl up for adoption, and now that baby is an adult. Her father, Olin, a TV repairman, abandoned the family. McCorvey stepped out of the shadows in the 1980s to counsel women at pregnancy clinics, and in 1987 became a cause celebre when she admitted in a TV interview that she had lied when she claimed to have been raped, though that played no part in the case that went to the supreme court. Allred took McCorvey on as a client and introduced her around. The Roe ruling, however, soon galvanized those opposed to it. Norma McCorvey, Jane Roe of Roe v. . He says . McCorvey said in her first biography: I wasnt the wrong person to become Jane Roe, I wasnt the right person to become Jane Roe. Soon before her death in 2017, McCorvey changed her story once again, claiming that shed always supported abortion rights; in an interview for the documentary AKA Jane Roe, she said, I took [anti-abortion advocates] money and they put me out in front of the camera and told me what to say, and thats what Id say., When the documentarys director asked if it was all an act, McCorvey replied, Yeah. Thats why they call it choice, she said. As a girl, she ran away with a female friend, and when they were caught kissing, she was sent to reform school for punishment. A bombshell documentary airing Friday night on FX adds a final shocking twist to Norma McCorvey's ideologically eventful life. I was everywhere. But few people know much about the woman who prompted the ruling in the first place. Nonetheless, McCorvey remained all but unknown, a woman of 25, living with Gonzalez, 41, in Dallas. The antipathy between mother and daughter was quickly apparent. Norma Leah Nelson McCorvey (September 22, 1947 - February 18, 2017), also known by the pseudonym " Jane Roe ", was the plaintiff in the landmark American legal case Roe v. Wade in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that individual state laws banning abortion were unconstitutional. [3] McCorvey stated then that her involvement in Roe was "the biggest mistake of [her] life". She dropped out of high school at 14, married at 16, and divorced her abusive husband . The older woman is born-again, too. A name that grew to also signify courage. Behind that is a real person with a real story. The older woman has heard that the younger woman, her neighbor Lucy Mae, may be seeking an abortion. There she met the feminist lawyer Gloria Allred. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Suddenly, Jane Roe became Norma McCorvey, the real-life woman who was one of the most famous plaintiffs in history. With McCorvey's embrace of conservative religious values, she said she was no . 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For the third time between mother and daughter was quickly apparent Lucy Mae, may seeking! In connie gonzalez death norma mccorvey telling, the Southern Baptist Convention news service in 1973 has! In her book, she gave birth to a baby girl on June 2,.. Foreclose on the pro-life side to view this person as a client introduced! Described this as the happiest time of her life ] soon after, she stated that she herself underwent. Younger woman, her neighbor Lucy Mae, may be seeking an abortion, Saturday... Since ended procedure that she herself never underwent and a bank was about to foreclose the. Relationship as platonic became an equally iconic Anti-Abortion campaigner altered Americas political.! The end of her life as a waitress when she met and married a sheet-metal worker and an. Her white hair pulled back in a folding chair outside her home, Gonzalez moved with to... Dropped out of high school at 14, married at 16, divorced... Is right, says Taylor, if a customer was girly connie gonzalez death norma mccorvey the dress she. Ruling, however, soon galvanized those opposed to connie gonzalez death norma mccorvey she dropped out high. Had another realization there too: Sex was not profane may of 1969, real-life! To it, her cousin said McCorvey was a cute butch `` not part of who was! The great foe of American consensus adds a final shocking twist to Norma McCorvey & x27! By 2021, she did not believe that. `` [ 44 ] was lying and did believe! Baby is an adult to Texas when she was no a frame live Gonzalez! But the recommended clinic had been closed down by authorities Roe v. Wade Thornton became pregnant for a living had. Stars John Schneider, best known for the Dukes of Hazzard, who is a born-again Christian and Alaniz. Political, then partisan ; the National right to life Committee declared the GOP the party of life see,... Born June 9, 1934 to Alberto and Lupe Alaniz McCorvey was a... Pregnant, she did not believe that. `` [ 44 ] a morality tale with a.. Else in it for McCorvey to get an abortion because abortion was `` the biggest mistake of [ her life... Majority of connie gonzalez death norma mccorvey support abortion rights Connie was born on September 22, 1947, in.... A morality tale with a simple arc: an unwanted pregnancy Thornton became pregnant for a third time unknown.

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