Norma McCorvey puts on a cannula and adjusts the scarf on her head. “This is my deathbed confession,” she says. McCorvey, the woman better known as Jane Roe, is ready.
It was 1969 and an impoverished McCorvey was pregnant for the second time. She’d tried to get an abortion by telling the doctor she had been raped (later, she would tell media that she hadn’t); afterward, she went to an underground abortion provider but didn’t go through with it. Instead, McCorvey went to an adoption attorney, who told her about two young lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee. They had just graduated from law school and were looking for a plaintiff for their suit to overturn the Texas law against abortion. They needed a poor woman because abortion was legal in some states at the time, and thus a plaintiff who couldn’t afford to travel to one of those states would show the burden of the law.
“I know how I felt when I found out I was pregnant, and I wasn’t gonna let another woman feel that way—not cheap, dirty, and no good. Women make mistakes,” McCorvey says. “And they make mistakes with men. Things happen. It’s just Mother Nature at work. You can’t stop it, you can’t explain it, it’s just something that happens.”
