February 2013 Issue

The Accidental Activist

She appeared to be the perfect plaintiff in a case that changed America’s political landscape: Roe v. Wade, decided by the Supreme Court 40 years ago this month. But Norma McCorvey, now 65, was never what she seemed: neither as the pregnant Texas woman who won fame as abortion-rights icon “Jane Roe,” nor as the pro-life activist she would become. Retracing her life through family, friends, and advisers, Joshua Prager investigates.
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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. The older woman has heard that the younger woman, her neighbor Lucy Mae, may be seeking an abortion. “You don’t have to do this,” she says, her brown eyes and long loose cheeks filling with emotion. “Children are a miracle—a gift from God!”

The women are performing a scene in Doonby, a movie about a drifter who awakens a sleepy Texas town to its spiritual possibilities. The movie, tentatively set to be released this year, is directed by Peter Mackenzie, a Catholic filmmaker from Britain. It stars John Schneider, best known for The Dukes of Hazzard, who is a born-again Christian.

The older woman is born-again, too. Her name is Norma McCorvey. She is not a professional actress. But back when Nixon was president, McCorvey landed the role of a lifetime: that of “Jane Roe,” the plaintiff in what would become one of the most divisive legal actions in American history.

Forty years ago, on January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that women had the right to an abortion “free of interference by the State,” as Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote in the Court’s majority opinion. The decision greatly expanded the legal boundaries for abortion in the United States, allowing women to terminate a pregnancy at any point during the first 24 weeks—that is, through the first and second trimesters. (Roe did, however, permit states to impose regulations in the second trimester, including who could perform abortions and where. It also gave states the right to ban most abortions in the third trimester.)

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. (The Wade in Roe v. Wade was Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade, the named defendant.) Roe v. Wade was a watershed legal ruling. But it also helped to turn abortion into the great foe of American consensus. Subsequent cases have made it clear that the Supreme Court majority in favor of abortion rights has been eroding, from 7 to 2 in Roe to 5 to 4 in cases decided in more recent years (with the majority deciding against abortion rights in a number of cases). Roe is undoubtedly the most familiar legal ruling in the minds of most Americans—not for nothing did Katie Couric ask Sarah Palin in a 2008 interview to cite any Supreme Court case except that one. But few people know much about the woman who prompted the ruling in the first place.

Norma McCorvey, now 65, has presented a version of her life in two autobiographies, I Am Roe (with Andy Meisler, 1994) and Won by Love (with Gary Thomas, 1997). In McCorvey’s telling, the story is a morality tale with a simple arc: An unwanted pregnancy. A lawsuit. Pro-choice. Born-again. Pro-life. Peace. The truth is sadder and less tidy. And with the help of a cache of documents retrieved two years ago from the clutter of a Texas home she had abandoned, as well as interviews with people once close to her, the story can be more accurately told.

Young Norma McCorvey had not wanted to further a cause; she had simply wanted an abortion and could not get one in Texas. Even after she became a plaintiff, plucked from obscurity through little agency of her own, she never did get that abortion. McCorvey thus became, ironically, a symbol of the right to a procedure that she herself never underwent. And in the decades since the Roe decision divided the country, the issue of abortion divided McCorvey too. She started out staunchly pro-choice. She is now just as staunchly pro-life.

But in truth McCorvey has long been less pro-choice or pro-life than pro-Norma. 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.

“I almost forgot i have a one thousand dollar fee,” she texted in August in response to a request for an interview. Told she could not be paid, she texted back: “Then we wont speak.”

Wild at Heart

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. Gonzalez had lost her short-term memory—and her lesbian partner—after suffering a stroke six years earlier. 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. She also remained clear about McCorvey. “She’s a phony,” said Gonzalez, her niece Linda Tovar helping her to find elusive words.

Gonzalez said that McCorvey had not visited her in years. But traces of McCorvey remained everywhere in the ranch house. The ashes of her father, in a blue-glass urn, sat beside figurines of Jesus and J.F.K. A black-and-white photograph of McCorvey—a girl of seven in cat’s-eye glasses crouched beside a German shepherd on a dirt road—stood in a frame. In the garage, rat-chewed boxes held McCorvey’s bills and prescriptions, photos and letters, clippings and speeches. McCorvey and Gonzalez had wrangled over money after their split, and a bank was about to foreclose on the property. The files in the garage were set to be thrown out. Gonzalez and her family gave them to me instead.

Taken as a whole, the files are a registry of loss: social, financial, physical, familial. They begin with the photocopied birth certificate of Norma Lea Nelson, born in Simmesport, Louisiana, on September 22, 1947—four ounces shy of seven pounds. Hers was not a happy household. Her mother, Mary, was physically abusive. Her brother, Jimmy, was mentally ill. Her father, Olin, a TV repairman, was soon gone, rarely to return. Norma was soon gone as well—off to a Catholic boarding school and then, after minor brushes with the law, briefly to a reform school.

Mary Sandefur (formerly Nelson), 90 this month, resides in an assisted-living home in a suburb of Houston. Approached last fall at another facility, in Dallas, she clutched the silver arms of a wheelchair with her hands, veins prominent under slack skin. Her eyes were light blue and cloudy, her white hair pulled back in a braid. She wore a zippered gray sweatshirt and black sweatpants bunched in the crotch. Her socked feet—pink-toed and bearing in black marker her room number, 225A—rolled her wheelchair slowly back and forth.

Mary now suffers from dementia. But then, she exhibited few symptoms. And speaking publicly of her daughter for the first time, she was lucid. She said that she had not seen McCorvey in a year. McCorvey had come to visit briefly in the Dallas trailer park on Fadeway Street, where Mary had been living. The antipathy between mother and daughter was quickly apparent. “She drank and she took dope and she slept with women,” Mary recalled, speaking of McCorvey’s young-adult years. She referred with contempt to her daughter’s sexual activity (“She was a die-hard whore”), which was primarily but not exclusively lesbian from a young age. Mary acknowledged that her own behavior was less than perfect: “I beat the fuck out of her,” she said, silently mouthing the obscenity, a solitary tooth rooted in her upper gum. “You can only take so much of nerviness. She was wild. Wild.

Norma was short and slight, nicknamed “Pixie” by a friend in Dallas. 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. 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. Within a year, he and Norma were married, and Norma was pregnant. But Woody, she wrote, could be violent, and Norma divorced him even before the birth of their daughter, Melissa, in May of 1965. Soon afterward, Norma granted her mother legal custody of her daughter.

“It took four people to raise me,” says Melissa, now 47, referring to Norma and Connie and Mary and Mary’s second husband, a trucker named Raymond Sandefur. “I didn’t have a stable … ” She stops. “I was everywhere. That’s the big regret of my life.” Melissa, a divorced mother of two, lives in a suburb of Houston. She speaks more quietly than her biological mother does, but has her same soulful eyes. She prefers not to reveal her last name.

McCorvey alleges in I Am Roe that Mary “kidnapped” Melissa, tricking Norma into signing adoption papers on the pretense that the papers had to do with insurance. Mary sought custody, McCorvey wrote, because she didn’t want the child raised by a lesbian. Mary disputed that. She agreed that, then as now, she was repelled by her daughter’s sexuality. But, Mary said, it was Norma’s drinking and drug use that rendered her unfit to raise a child. (Mary acknowledged that she herself was a heavy drinker.) “I told her I was going to take [Melissa] if she didn’t straighten out,” she said.

McCorvey concedes in her first book that, while Mary was raising Melissa, she herself was raising Cain—abusing drugs and alcohol, and sleeping with a string of women. “She’d come to work and bring a dress and Levi’s,” recalls Andi Taylor, a friend who worked with Norma at a gay bar in Dallas called the White Carriage. 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. In 1967, at age 19, she became pregnant for a second time. At birth, this baby was given up to a waiting adoptive couple that has kept its identity private.

In September 1969, the month she turned 22, McCorvey became pregnant for a third time. Norma told her doctor, Richard Lane, that she did not want to bring this pregnancy to term. And she could not afford to travel to any of the six states where abortion was legal: Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon, and Washington. Dr. Lane suggested that McCorvey consult an adoption lawyer in Dallas named Henry McCluskey, with whom he had a long-standing arrangement. “I would deliver the baby,” Lane, now 75, recalls. “He would then pick up the baby and deliver it to the adoptive parents.” McCorvey was interested in an abortion, not an adoption, but she agreed to meet with McCluskey, visiting him in January 1970.

The short life of Henry McCluskey can be re-assembled from the sprawling mess inside the Dallas home—not to mention in the shed and garage, and on the back porch—where Henry’s sister, Barbara McCluskey Gouge, now lives. 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. A man named David Hovila drugged and then shot McCluskey three times. 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. She adds, “Daddy had to get on the stand and identify some clothes. He broke down.” Hovila was convicted of murder and died in prison. Gouge says that her brother left behind 149 clients. Roughly a third of his cases concerned adoptions, and the rest involved an assortment of criminal work.

In May of 1969, months before meeting Norma McCorvey, McCluskey filed a suit taking aim at an anti-sodomy law in Texas. The case, Alvin L. Buchanan v. Charles Batchelor, concerned a male client convicted of having consensual oral sex with another man. According to the book Liberty and Sexuality, by David J. Garrow, McCluskey had gotten advice about the case from a friend, Linda Coffee, a lawyer whom he had first met in a Dallas church when both were children. In January of 1970, after Norma came to see him, McCluskey returned Coffee’s favor by calling her with a tip.

Coffee, McCluskey knew, was on the lookout for a plaintiff. Sarah Weddington, a former classmate of Coffee’s at the University of Texas law school, had been urging Coffee to find a way to file suit against the abortion statutes in Texas. Coffee and Weddington had been academic stars, and both were committed to advocacy on behalf of women. Coffee had clerked for the renowned feminist federal judge Sarah T. Hughes (who in 1963 administered the oath of office to Lyndon B. Johnson, aboard Air Force One). 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. The two lawyers, both in their 20s, were not much older than McCorvey.

Coffee and Weddington met their prospective client at an Italian restaurant in Dallas. Their needs were specific. As Coffee told a reporter in 1983, “It had to be a pregnant woman wanting to get an abortion. She couldn’t have the funds to travel to California or New York for a legal abortion. And we had to have someone who could take the publicity. We weren’t able to guarantee her anonymity.” Also, the pregnancy could not be too far along or the issue might be moot before the case was filed. Five months pregnant at the time, McCorvey seemed a perfect plaintiff.

Coffee filed Roe v. Wade at the Dallas federal district courthouse on March 3, 1970. 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. They also successfully argued for continuing to designate the plaintiff as the anonymous “Jane Roe.” The hearing began in May and ended on June 17 when a three-judge panel struck down the Texas abortion statutes. But the state appealed the decision immediately, so for the time being the statutes remained law. McCorvey claims in I Am Roe that she asked Coffee how long the appeals process would take, since if it went quickly, she believed, she might still be able to get an abortion. According to McCorvey’s account, Coffee told her that, regardless, it was too late. And in the days following, McCorvey, in her own telling, was furious and “got drunk, and pounded my fists into my [pregnant] belly in frustration.”

Coffee and Weddington seemed to be less interested, understandably, in the predicament of one plaintiff than in the rights of millions. And it is possible that they were not completely frank with McCorvey at the outset. (Any case of this magnitude would inevitably take more time than a pregnant woman has.) That said, McCorvey’s 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. This baby was adopted immediately by a family that has kept its identity private.

Soon after, McCorvey met Connie Gonzalez. They were quickly a couple, two strong, gay women from underprivileged families. McCorvey moved into the house on Cactus Lane that Gonzalez had bought with money earned from spackling and painting. Gonzalez remembers clearly the advice she gave her partner right away: to stop getting pregnant, so that she “could have a better life.”

Roe continued on to the Supreme Court, oral arguments being heard in December 1971. 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. Three months later, in January 1973, the justices handed down the decision that has altered America’s political landscape.

Coffee and Weddington still live in Texas, though their paths have diverged. After serving in the Texas legislature and as an aide to President Jimmy Carter, Weddington has gone on to teach and lecture, and to found a center named for herself that “serves as the base for Sarah Weddington’s professional activities.” Coffee worked for years as a plaintiff’s attorney in sex- and race-discrimination cases. Since 2006, according to the State Bar of Texas, she has chosen not to pay her occupation taxes and annual dues, and is no longer licensed.

When asked for an interview, Weddington e-mailed that she had no time to spare. Approached outside her home, after calls went unanswered, Coffee retreated to her kitchen without a word and drew her blinds.

Speaking Out

McCorvey remained largely aloof from the legal proceedings around Roe. 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. However, the claim she has long made—that, in the days and years after Roe, she sought to remain anonymous, staying mum until a television interview 11 years later—is false. In reality, McCorvey publicly identified herself as Jane Roe four days after the decision. “It’s great to know,” McCorvey told the Baptist Press, a Nashville-based news service affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, “that other women will not have to go through what I did.” The Associated Press wrote a follow-up story on January 27 under the headline abortion reformer sheds “jane roe.”

Nonetheless, McCorvey remained all but unknown, a woman of 25, living with Gonzalez, 41, in Dallas. The pair cleaned apartments for a living and had an active social life. Daughter Melissa, who occasionally spent holidays with McCorvey, says she remembers the presence of marijuana plants. “Their home was the party to be at,” recalls Susanne Ashworth, an executive at a steel company in Dallas who met Norma and Connie in 1982 and became a good friend. “I hadn’t been ‘out’ three or four years. I was a kid in a candy store”—thankful for entrée to a close-knit lesbian circle.

A decade after Roe, McCorvey began volunteering at the Aaron Women’s Health Center, in Dallas, and also began speaking to the media about once a year, usually around the anniversary of Roe. She told the press that she had become pregnant after being raped, filing away the yellowing newspaper accounts of her interviews in the boxes she left with Connie. Then, in 1987, she acknowledged in a television interview with columnist Carl Rowan that the claim of rape had been completely untrue. (The actual father was a consensual partner she referred to as “Carl” in her book I Am Roe.) McCorvey’s lawyers had never mentioned an alleged rape in court, and it formed no part of their legal argument. Constitutionally speaking, McCorvey’s admission was an irrelevance. But pro-life activists now asserted that the Roe ruling hinged on a falsehood. “As a result of McCorvey’s lie, more than 20 million babies have been aborted,” Jack Nunn, of Ridgeway, Virginia, wrote to the Greensboro News & Record. People in Norma’s corner were upset, too. “A little bit of hell broke loose,” recalls Charlotte Taft, an abortion-rights activist and the founder of the Routh Street Women’s Clinic, in Dallas. “Everybody had to pick up the pieces. O.K., now what are we supposed to say about this woman?”

McCorvey had gotten herself some attention. 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 Court’s Roe decision, which McCorvey would then sign. “I think it’s accurate to say that [we] were manipulating Norma,” Gus Clemens, the advertising executive who designed the product, recalled in November, “and that Norma was manipulating us.” In the end the idea went nowhere. But some members of this same group, together with McCorvey, soon established the Jane Roe Foundation. 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. “I heard the shotgun blast go off in my sleep, like a crack of thunder in a bright blue sky,” McCorvey later wrote in I Am Roe. Gonzalez, she would recall, covered her with her body. (The shooters were never found and the police made no arrests.) Seated in a folding chair outside her home, Gonzalez puffed on a cigarette and maintained flatly that the shooting had never occurred. Their friend Susanne Ashworth was inclined to agree. With McCorvey, she said, “it was just drama.” She went on: “A story would be told one way, and three days later it would be completely different.”

McCorvey wrote in her book that the shooting had been an important hinge in her life. A few days after the alleged event, as the Supreme Court prepared to hear oral arguments in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services—a case challenging recent Missouri laws that put restrictions on abortion—McCorvey flew to Washington to march in support of abortion rights. There she met the feminist lawyer Gloria Allred. Roe had turned Sarah Weddington into a national figure. 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. Allred took McCorvey on as a client and introduced her around. “Her name,” wrote Knight-Ridder reporter Sue Reilly, “was on the lips of people like Cybill Shepherd, Gloria Steinem, Jesse Jackson, Marlo Thomas, Glenn Close, Jane Fonda and about 500,000 others amassed in support of Roe v. Wade.

Accompanied by Allred, McCorvey flew to Los Angeles for a brunch at the restaurant Baci with a roomful of pro-choice activists, including Leonard Nimoy and Valerie Harper, who paid $100 a plate to attend. In L.A., Allred also arranged for McCorvey to get lessons in public speaking. Among McCorvey’s documents is a card from the Los Angeles firm Ready for Media with a typed list of pointers. (“Say Versus rather than ‘V.’ ” “ ‘Abortion’ instead of ‘It.’ ” “If you’re asked a three-part question, answer the one you like best.”)

Reportedly, the brunch at Baci was a benefit for the Jane Roe Foundation. But the foundation received no money. 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. (Allred says that she was at no time affiliated with the foundation, adding, “I wouldn’t raise money for an organization … and allow it to be siphoned off to an individual.”) McCorvey eventually cut her ties with the Jane Roe Foundation—“It didn’t go anywhere,” says the Texas lawyer Tom Goff, who helped create it—and in 1990 she established a new one, the Jane Roe Women’s Center, self-described as a “multi-purpose center for low-income women,” with offices in San Francisco and, later, Dallas.

McCorvey returned to Dallas, where she gave some talks and partied too, helped by payments from NBC for the Holly Hunter movie. (The network paid her 60 percent of 5 percent of the film’s gross; as of 2003, the film had earned her $10,613.) In 1994, HarperCollins published McCorvey’s life story, I Am Roe. Co-author Andy Meisler, who would later write three guides to the X-Files television show, does not recall what McCorvey received as an advance, but he says that it was not a fortune: “When I knew her, she was cashing checks at the 7-Eleven.” Meisler met with Norma at her home a few times over the course of a year and did not doubt the accuracy of her account.

I Am Roe was well received. And Gloria Allred kept McCorvey in the spotlight, helping her to speak out against, say, the nomination of a judge or the murder of an abortionist. “The anti-choice people are just turning into terrorists,” McCorvey told the A.P. in January of 1995, according to a clipping in her files. She added, “This issue is the only thing I live for. I live, eat, breathe, think everything about abortion.”

About-Face

In the spring of 1995, McCorvey was working at a Dallas women’s clinic on Markville Drive called A Choice for Women when Operation Rescue, a Christian group devoted to making abortion illegal, moved in next door. The move seemed a deliberate provocation, although Flip Benham, then the national director of Operation Rescue and an evangelical minister, attributed it to the work of God. When the Associated Press asked McCorvey for a comment, she said, “I’m horrified.”

But right away—“instantly,” Benham recalls—McCorvey “would come over and ask us to pray for her . . . She began to see me as someone who could help her work things out.” The two began talking about their pasts and then about the Bible. Before long, says Benham, they were calling one another “Flipper” and “Miss Norma.” In July, McCorvey accepted Jesus as her savior. In August, in Garland, Texas, Benham baptized McCorvey in the backyard swimming pool of a member of his congregation. Pro-life activists were exultant. “The poster child has jumped off the poster,” the head of Texans United for Life observed at the time.

Publicly, the pro-choice movement more or less shrugged. McCorvey’s former lawyer, Sarah Weddington, said, “All Jane Roe ever did was sign a one-page legal affidavit.” But Charlotte Taft, the women’s-rights advocate, regrets that the pro-choice camp did not make McCorvey feel more needed or more special. And, she says, evangelical religion provided Norma with something the pro-choice movement could not: the comfort of absolute truth. “She got to know she is right,” says Taft.

There was something else in it for McCorvey, something practical. As Gloria Allred points out, “It’s a career choice as well.” After resigning her position at A Choice for Women and shuttering her second foundation, McCorvey helped to create a new Texas nonprofit, Roe No More Ministry, devoted to undoing all she had previously stood for. It was Roe v. Roe.

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. In addition, Benham says he saw to it “that she and Miss Connie had enough money … maybe $200 a week.” McCorvey received more when Thomas Nelson, a Christian publisher, bought the rights to retell her story, in 1997. “She got $80,000 from the book,” says Benham. “I helped work out that deal.” Won by Love laid out a life that, after profane beginnings, was in full compliance with evangelical ideals. The born-again McCorvey was now appalled by abortion—and by homosexuality. Although McCorvey continued to live with Connie, she described their relationship as having turned platonic. McCorvey’s daughter Melissa recalls that McCorvey would introduce Connie by saying, “This is my aunt,” or “This is my godmother,” or “This is my cousin.”

In 1998, McCorvey redefined herself yet again, converting to Roman Catholicism after instruction by Fr. Frank Pavone of the organization Priests for Life. At McCorvey’s First Communion, a priest spoke of “her complicity in the evil” of Roe, and of her subsequent transformation. McCorvey saved copies of the homily. 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. Raise lots of money.” Elsewhere, McCorvey noted that in 1999 she had earned $25,200 in honoraria alone.

As McCorvey traveled, her partner was generally by her side. “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. The two flew there together.

In July 2004, Gonzalez suffered her stroke. Two months later, according to a letter from her lawyer, McCorvey made arrangements to have yet another new foundation, Crossing Over Ministry, take ownership of the Dallas home she shared with Gonzalez. (The house had recently been appraised at roughly $80,000.) Crossing Over Ministry was a Catholic group devoted to reversing Roe v. Wade. It is now dormant.

Gonzalez applied for food stamps in 2005. The next year, McCorvey made a public plea for financial help—“because we were hungry,” as she told The Dallas Morning News. Gonzalez soon required more care, and McCorvey left her, moving far away to a house in the town of Smithville, midway between San Antonio and Houston. She left behind with Gonzalez the documentary remains of her lives as Norma and Jane Roe. Linda Tovar moved in to care for her aunt. When they lost the house, Gonzalez moved with Linda to the Dallas home of another niece. “Norma has never been able to do the right thing,” says her daughter, Melissa. “Never.”

“A Little Bit of an Orphan”

At a diner in Smithville, two springs ago, Norma McCorvey sat at a table opposite the actress Erin Way, whose on-screen pregnancy she sought to save in Doonby. 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. “She feels at the end of the day a little bit like she doesn’t have a side that she can belong to,” Way says. “She’s a little bit of an orphan.”

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. (In an email she sent him in 2005 she called him a “user” and said he would no longer be her “mouth-peace.”) McCorvey has alienated other pro-life partners too. “She just fishes for money,” says Flip Benham, the man who led her to the pro-life side. According to Fr. Frank Pavone, McCorvey now subsists on free room and board from strangers, and “a few hundred dollars here and there” from his church. Roe has been her life, but it’s no longer much of a living.

Still, there remains “the big temptation on the pro-life side to view this person as a trophy,” says Pavone. This past November, McCorvey received $1,000 to appear in a Florida television ad paid for by Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, who ran (unsuccessfully) as an independent for election to the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida. “Do not vote for Barack Obama,” McCorvey said against a background of images of aborted fetuses. “He murders babies.” That Obama won re-election and will likely be able to appoint one or more pro-choice Supreme Court justices all but ensures that McCorvey will have *Roe—*and Jane Roe—to rail against for years to come.