DALLAS — The way Norma McCorvey’s oldest daughter sees it, her late mother — best known as “Jane Roe” in the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights ruling — spent her life striving to help women, but got caught in a battle between movements wanting to use her.
“Because of the part she played in Roe, everybody wanted a piece of her, they didn’t really want her to say what she wanted to, but they wanted something from her,” said Melissa Mills, the only of McCorvey’s three daughters who had a relationship with their biological mother.
McCorvey and Roe v. Wade, a case that originated in Dallas County, are in the headlines as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to issue its ruling on a Mississippi abortion law challenge that is expected to overturn the 1973 decision that established federal abortion rights.
McCorvey was a complicated figure in a legal case that became a touchstone in the culture wars, celebrated by champions as an affirmation of women’s freedom and denounced by opponents as the legalization of murder of the unborn.
She was not the first plaintiff to challenge a state abortion law, but Roe v. Wade was the first such case to work its way through the appeals process to the Supreme Court. She used the pseudonym Jane Roe to protect her privacy. The defendant, Wade, was the Dallas County district attorney, Henry Wade, an official responsible for enforcing Texas abortion laws.
“The pro-choice people wanted her because of her being the plantiff, but they didn’t want her to say anything, they didn’t want her to have a voice. And the pro-life people wanted her because it made them look good because they tamed the devil, they made her out to be the devil,” Mills said said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News.
McCorvey was often silenced by abortion rights advocates Mills said, while those who opposed abortion wanted her to change.
“She didn’t fit anybody’s mold and that was hard for her on both sides. For pro-choice she wasn’t rich or educated or well spoken, all of those things. For the pro-life people she was gay, an alcoholic, she had used drugs most of her life, she wanted an abortion, she wanted women to have the things they needed to take care of themselves,” said Mills, a nurse and mother who lives near Houston.
McCorvey denounced her affiliation with the anti-abortion movement before she died in 2017 at age 69.
Abortion rights activists questioned her motives when McCorvey decamped in 1994, after years as a poster child for their cause, and was baptized in a swimming pool by evangelical minister Flip Benham, who led Operation Rescue, which opposes abortion rights.
“I think they didn’t do her right, I really do. They were kinda cruel to her on the pro-choice side, pro-life was really good to her but she had to give up her existence of who she was to be on the pro-life side. She couldn’t be gay,” Mills said. “It was hard to watch.”
Mills said McCorvey wanted to help women “not go through the things she went through and not feel the way she did and not feel unimportant.”
‘Couldn’t take care of herself financially’
Mills laments that the human elements behind the Roe case often are overshadowed by politics.
Homeless and without resources and on her third pregnancy McCorvey wanted to obtain an abortion, but Texas law prohibited the procedure at the time. McCorvey would be referred to lawyers to assist her in obtaining one.
The lawyers she would encounter during Roe, Texans Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, took her case in 1970, but the ultimate Supreme Court decision wasn’t made until 1973 and McCorvey never got the abortion despite her desire to get one. By the time of the decision, McCorvey’s child was 2 years old and had been adopted.
“I think she was hopeful. I really do. And she wanted it so bad,” Mills said of her mom’s desire to get an abortion.
Rather, McCorvey gave her third daughter, Shelley Thornton, up for adoption like she did her first two daughters.
“She couldn’t take care of herself financially. Much less a child and then work the hours she worked,” Mills said.
McCorvey’s mother adopted Mills and raised her as her own. McCorvey would be in and out of her life as a sister figure, finally remaining close in McCorvey’s final years.
Her mother was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, while Mills was raised as a Baptist and considers herself Christian but doesn’t attend a particular church. Mills says the grandmother who raised her held traditional values, while her biological mother wanted to be anything but “barefoot and pregnant.”
‘Pro-woman’
Over time, McCorvey was eventually on both sides of the abortion battle, her views seemingly moving across the line from supporting abortion rights to opposing them. But Mills said her mother was consistent about one thing — she was always “pro-woman.”
Another constant cited by Mills was that McCorvey never wanted the procedure to be “abused.”
“I don’t think she wanted it to be abused by either physicians or by patients,” Mills said, explaining that she supports limits on late-term abortions.
“To me it says she didn’t like the way the health care part of it, the physician, the physicians allowed certain things. You know what I mean? They let it go past too many months and they let certain people just keep coming back to have more than one procedure,” Mills said.
McCorvey worked for an abortion clinic before becoming an evangelical Christian and denouncing the procedure. Mills said her mother often saw repeat “customers,” and believed some abortions were performed too late in gestational development.
“It’s kind of crazy that they would keep doing that late trimester, you know, late second trimester early third trimester abortions. And that’s just insane,” she said.
Mills advocates that a six-week ban or 15-week ban is too soon, but still thinks there should be guidelines. She cited examples such as maternal age and rape as areas in which such restrictions do not work, drawing on her own experience as a gynecological nurse and her passion for women’s health.
“A woman shouldn’t be told what to do with her body and when to start a family and not start a family by anybody but that woman and the doctor, but they do need to have some guidelines, and they do need to have procedures in place,” she said.
Mills thinks that abortion should be decided on more of a “case-by-case basis,” but with guidelines including to abortion providers.
“I truly believe it’s just like any other type of facility, they need to be checked on. They need to have those checks and balances. They need people to go in there and see what they’re doing. They need to see how they’re performing,” she said.
Mills however, is concerned that without legal abortion, people will begin hurting themselves.
“It’s bad either way, because then if they do stop abortions, then we’re going to have all these unnecessary. … People, I mean, hurting themselves by killing themselves,” she said.
She is also concerned that Texas and the nation are not prepared to care for infants and children nor provide the flexibility for women who work. She says access to sex education and contraceptives needs to be prioritized.
Abortion, Mills says is not “cut and dry.”
“Everybody thinks if a person is pro-choice, they think that that person believes that they should just kill babies. That’s not what it’s about. You know, it’s about our choice as a woman to when we are ready to start that family,” she said.
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(This report contains material from The Dallas Morning News archives.)
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