How the Real Jane Roe Shaped the Abortion Wars – The New Yorker
McCorvey died in 2017, and three years later a documentary about her, “AKA Jane Roe,” portrayed her as having never truly changed her mind about abortion but having been paid off to say she had. Yet, in Prager’s persuasive telling, it was not so much a secret deal as a product of McCorvey’s personality. It’s true that in the documentary McCorvey, interviewed in a nursing home, tells the filmmaker, Nick Sweeney, “If a young woman wants to have an abortion, fine, it’s no skin off my ass.” And when Sweeney asks if her advocacy for the pro-life side “was all an act,” she replies, “Yeah. I did it well, too.” Though the film suggests that anti-abortion activists had paid McCorvey handsomely, Prager says she made something like eight hundred dollars on average for a talk, and “struggled to hold on to what little she earned.” In fact, the pro-choice side had paid her for public appearances, too, but she never got rich off either movement. You don’t get the impression that McCorvey was purposefully lying to activists on either side. When she decided that people were being high and mighty with her, it was enough to send her skittering back and forth across what seemed to others like profound dividing lines of conscience and belief. She just doesn’t seem to have cared all that much about reproductive rights. McCorvey, speaking of her defection to the anti-abortion camp, told Prager, “I was lonely for some excitement. I needed to do something that would cause media attention. Isn’t that awful?”
Prager got an astonishing array of people to talk to him for this book—from short-term girlfriends of McCorvey’s to the son of Henry Wade, the Dallas D.A. who was Roe’s legal antagonist and who, we learn here, was secretly pro-choice. The book is most compelling, though, when it’s relating the personal saga of a woman and her family caught in the gears of history. Prager brings in two characters beyond McCorvey’s orbit—Mildred Jefferson, an African American pro-life leader, and Curtis Boyd, a doctor who provided abortions before and after Roe—but their stories don’t add much to the narrative. Its drive comes from Prager’s efforts to track down the three daughters whom McCorvey gave up for adoption.
What he learns about these women doesn’t cohere into a neat takeaway, although it’s notable that all three tell him they are pro-choice. The oldest, who was partly raised by Norma’s mother and sister, and who knew Norma, yearns for a deep family bond with her two half sisters and hopes that they’ll find a way to accept their mother. The middle sister, who most resembles McCorvey and is, like her, a lesbian, is more interested in information about her biological parents than in a relationship with them. The youngest, the so-called Roe baby, was identified by a pro-life private detective shortly before her nineteenth birthday, laying the groundwork for a National Enquirer story. Until then, she had pretended that her real parents were Ann-Margret and Elvis Presley, and she tells Prager that she wishes she’d never learned the facts of her birth. The sisters’ lives are ordinary, zigzagging between rough passages (depression, divorce, domestic abuse, addiction) and periods of fulfillment (going back to school, loving a job at a florist’s, meeting a nice new guy or gal, embracing stay-at-home motherhood). And yet, because their biological mother happens to have been Jane Roe, they are also extraordinary. It’s like a fairy tale set in working-class America, each sister carrying a secret and a curse.
Would a different Jane Roe have changed the way the case has been perceived over the years? Reading “The Family Roe,” you wonder whether someone other than McCorvey might have been a better fit for the role, and whether she might have been served better by sidestepping it. The one thing McCorvey had wanted when she went to see the lawyers she’d been referred to was an abortion—and she never got it. Weddington and Coffee do seem to have told her that, by the time her case made it to court, it would almost certainly be too late to end the pregnancy. But they did not help her to get an abortion, and, as Prager notes, they could at least have tried. Weddington had worked with a service that referred people seeking abortions to clinics in California (where it was legal) and in Mexico (where it was quasi-legal). She herself had obtained an abortion in Mexico a few years earlier.
Weddington was only twenty-six when she argued Roe in front of the Supreme Court. The prevailing atmosphere was so sexist that the Texas assistant attorney general prefaced his argument with a lame quip about the difficulty of facing off against “such beautiful ladies.” There is much to admire about her: she went on to win a seat in the state legislature, to write a memoir about the case, and to become a popular speaker on college campuses. But Prager says that in early interviews Weddington made it sound as if McCorvey had decided to carry her pregnancy to term to make sure she would still have standing, thereby saving the case. In fact, Prager writes, “Norma had shown no such valor.” Coffee gets a more sympathetic treatment, perhaps in part because Weddington declined to talk to Prager, and in part because Coffee had a much lower profile for decades. By the time Prager located her, she had been acquitted of fraud charges (after allegedly forging a client’s signature) and suspended by the Texas bar a few times, when she got behind on her licensing payments. She was living quietly with her partner in a small town in East Texas, where it was not easy to be open about her gay identity. Her finances were precarious enough that she relied on a local food bank. When she was invited, with Weddington, to a pro-choice fund-raising event in 2019, the former partners in history-making hadn’t seen each other in twenty-seven years.
By the time the pro-life movement took McCorvey aboard, anti-abortion activists had widened their focus from the vulnerable fetus to the woman carrying it—who, they argued, would be morally, emotionally, and physically damaged by an abortion. The purported damage ranged from regret to a constellation of woes called “post-abortion syndrome.” Ronald Reagan’s Surgeon General C. Everett Koop was tasked with collecting evidence of P.A.S., but admitted that he couldn’t find any. Evidence of routine regret was also lacking. A large-scale study conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found that, five years out, the vast majority of women who had undergone an abortion said it had been the right choice for them. In any case, regret is a dubious basis for policy. People regret all kinds of decisions, large and small, but we don’t proactively deprive them of their decision-making agency on the chance that they might. The anti-abortion movement made McCorvey into a sad-eyed embodiment of tormenting second thoughts. Here, after all, was the very woman whose pregnancy had legalized abortion, now decrying it. But the regret McCorvey expressed time and again was about not getting an abortion—she even shared that sentiment with a reporter sent to cover her born-again baptism.
There had been other possible plaintiffs, other possible routes to the Supreme Court. As a young litigator with the A.C.L.U., Ruth Bader Ginsburg had hoped that the Court’s first abortion case would be one in which she was representing a woman seeking not to have an abortion. The woman was Susan Struck, a nurse in the Air Force who became pregnant in 1970, while serving in Vietnam. The military gave her two choices: have an abortion or be immediately discharged. (Though illegal in most states, abortion was allowed on military bases.) The Supreme Court agreed to hear Struck v. Secretary of Defense, but in the meantime the Air Force, realizing that it would likely lose, overturned the policy. An opinion in the Struck case, Ginsburg believed, would have anchored the right to have an abortion—like the right not to have one—in the notion of equality. A whole class of people could not be denied equal treatment under the law simply because they were subject to the condition of pregnancy.
“The Family Roe” tells us that Weddington and Coffee, hedging their bets against the possibility that Norma would drop out of the suit, had challenged the Texas abortion law on behalf of another plaintiff as well. Her name was Marsha King, and she was, Prager writes, “unlike Norma in almost every way.” A married engineer with an advanced degree in physics, King had talked openly about the importance of abortion rights ever since having a gruelling procedure herself, in Mexico. She was in ill health and didn’t want to risk getting pregnant again, but, because she wasn’t currently pregnant, the Texas court that heard the case found she didn’t have standing. Even so, there might have been many other candidates like King. By 1970, there had been speak-outs where women came forward in public forums to talk about their own fears of unwanted pregnancy and their experiences with illegal abortionists. These were feminists attuned to the wider significance of legalizing abortion, more committed to a cause than to their own immediate self-interest.
In the years since Roe, some civil-rights lawyers seem to have sought out appealing, well-spoken clients, with a history of activism or at least developed opinions on the issue at stake. That was true, for instance, of most of the plaintiffs in the lawsuits seeking to legalize same-sex marriage, who were upstanding embodiments of respectability politics—monogamous, middle class, sometimes devotedly caring for a disabled partner. Projecting a sort of “disdain for politics” was often part of the package, as Cynthia Godsoe, a professor at Brooklyn Law School, points out in an essay called “Perfect Plaintiffs.” Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the case that established same-sex marriage, told reporters, “No one could ever accuse us of being activists. . . . We just lived our lives.” Still, Godsoe writes, “several had been involved in previous LGB advocacy; all were attractive candidates for careful recruitment by cause lawyers.” A belief in the mission and the support of other people who believe in it can gird a person for a long, public fight, making things easier on the client, emotionally, and on the larger movement, politically.
And yet a plaintiff’s character or commitment doesn’t necessarily matter to the outcome of the case. It was easy to love the Lovings, the plaintiffs in Loving v. Virginia (1967), which legalized interracial marriage across the country. Their lawyers could accurately present them as ordinary, apolitical rural folks, a couple who loved each other and simply wanted to live together quietly and legally. Yet, as Godsoe notes, these dream clients with the dream name came to their lawyers by “happenstance.” John Lawrence, of Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the landmark Supreme Court case that overturned sodomy laws, was nobody’s idea of a dream plaintiff. He had displayed no interest in gay-rights activism, and he had a previous conviction for vehicular homicide. One night, the police invaded his home without a warrant and arrested him for having sex with another man. Lawrence’s partner wasn’t even his lover, as the law professor Dale Carpenter revealed in his book on the case, “Flagrant Conduct.” But arrests for sodomy in Texas were rare, so this one offered a valuable opportunity to challenge a set of assumptions behind legal anti-gay discrimination. McCorvey’s main qualification, too, was being in the right place in the right condition at the right time, and being willing to sign an affidavit.