Word: mccorvey
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...Jane Roe would never, never have done what McCorvey did last week: defect. On Tuesday she quit her job at Dallas' A Choice For Women clinic. On Thursday she announced that she had been baptized in a swimming pool by none other than Flip Benham, head of the antiabortion group Operation Rescue. She said she would be an Operation Rescue volunteer, "serving the Lord and helping women save babies." Said Sarah Weddington, one of the lawyers who recruited McCorvey and took Roe v. Wade to the Supreme Court: "When I first heard about it, I had to sit down...
Weddington should not have been so stunned. McCorvey was always a Roe of convenience. Weddington and then partner Linda Coffee had already planned a legal challenge to the nation's abortion laws and were trolling for a plaintiff when, in 1970, they met the ex-carnival barker who told of having been gang-raped and being unable to end her pregnancy because of Texas law. McCorvey always resented the fact that Roe was resolved too late for her to abort--she gave up the child--and that she was so far out of the loop that she learned...
Last March Benham moved Operation Rescue's national headquarters into the same small building that houses McCorvey's clinic. After some recrimination, the two bonded, and she told him of her doubts. By May she was doing odd jobs around Operation Rescue's offices. Then last month seven-year-old Emily Mackey, the daughter of the office manager, invited the woman she now calls "Auntie" to church, and McCorvey accepted Jesus Christ...
Many antiabortionists certainly hope McCorvey's conversion is, in the words of Bill Price, president of Texans United For Life, "a defining point in the history of the battle against abortion." But as Weddington (who, tellingly, still refers to McCorvey as "Jane Roe") points out, Roe was a class action, and presumably not all of the people McCorvey represented have made the same journey as she. Moreover, if she does go on to work for Benham, McCorvey will undoubtedly be the first volunteer in Operation Rescue history to support a woman's right to a first-trimester abortion...
...always possible that under Benham's influence, McCorvey will move to a sharper antiabortion stance. She says her new friends are praying for that. They will also have to come to terms with her 26-year live-in relationship with a woman. "Norma will be set free from it," Benham has said, possibly indicating that McCorvey's new mentors, like her old ones, have their own agenda...