Word: roe
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Norma McCorvey, in her 1994 book I Am Roe, described a feminist leader's visit to the Dallas women's clinic where McCorvey toiled as a volunteer. Intimidated by the woman's success and poise, McCorvey tried to salvage her own sense of importance by revealing what she had told few others: "I'm the Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade." The woman, wrote McCorvey, "smiled and shook her head. 'No, no,' she said. 'I know who Jane Roe is. She wouldn't be here doing this kind of work...
There are a lot of things McCorvey has done and been that Jane Roe's millions of admirers probably wish she hadn't. Until she unmasked herself publicly in 1989, they could imagine Roe as noble and steadfast, embattled yet triumphant. They didn't envision a former drug addict and dealer; someone so spiritually needy that she ran through religions as if channel surfing; someone testy enough to (in the presence of a Texas Monthly reporter) invite a critic who accused her of killing babies to "bring yours over here and we'll do them...
...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...
...rights. For the last 20 years, abortion rights groups have had to defend the famous decision against constant attacks. In fact, McCorvey's recent conservative turn mirrors some of the Court's chipping away at its original decision, including restricting second trimester abortion rights which it had upheld through Roe v. Wade in more recent cases...