Norma McCorvey, plaintiff in Roe v. Wade case, dies at 69

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 opponent of the procedure, died Saturday. She was 69.

McCorvey, who lived in Forestville in 1989-’90, died at an assisted living center in Katy, Texas, said journalist Joshua Prager. Prager 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.

McCorvey and her partner arrived in Sonoma County in June 1989. In late September, she spoke to about 800 students at Sonoma State University and encouraged them to study women’s issues.

In a subsequent interview with Press Democrat reporter Susan Swartz, she said she had moved to Sonoma County after receiving threats when she revealed she was Jane Roe.

But in 1995, 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. She became happily involved with Operation Rescue.

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.

By August 1998, she had changed faiths to Catholicism and had left Operation Rescue. 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.

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. She was eventually sent to a state reform school for girls in the northern Texas town of Gainesville.

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.

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.