When I read, in early 2010, that Norma had not had an abortion, I began to wonder whether the child, who would then be an adult of almost 40, was aware of his or her background. But as Justice Blackmun noted, the length of the legal process had made that impossible. I had assumed, having never given the matter much thought, that the plaintiff who had won the legal right to have an abortion had in fact had one. McCorvey relinquished Shelley for adoption a few days after her daughter’s birth. Norma McCorvey-“Jane Roe” of the lawsuit-in Dallas in 1985. The third child was the one whose conception led to Roe. Her second child, Jennifer, had been adopted by a couple in Dallas. At Norma’s urging, her own mother, Mary, had adopted the girl (though Norma later claimed that Mary had kidnapped her). Playgrounds were a source of distress: Empty, they reminded Norma of Roe full, they reminded her of the children she had let go. She no more absolutely opposed Roe than she had ever absolutely supported it she believed that abortion ought to be legal for precisely three months after conception, a position she stated publicly after both the Roe decision and her religious awakening. Norma could be salty and fun, but she was also self-absorbed and dishonest, and she remained, until her death in 2017, at the age of 69, fundamentally unhappy. Being born-again did not give her peace pro-life leaders demanded that she publicly renounce her homosexuality (which she did, at great personal cost). Thereafter, slowly, she became an activist-working at first with pro-choice groups and then, after becoming a born-again Christian in 1995, with pro-life groups. A decade later, in 1981, Norma briefly volunteered for the National Organization for Women in Dallas. The women painted and cleaned apartments in a pair of buildings in South Dallas. Months after filing Roe, Norma met a woman named Connie Gonzales, almost 17 years her senior, and moved into her home. But she slept far more often with women, and worked in lesbian bars. She bore three children, each of them placed for adoption. She had casual affairs with men, and one brief marriage at age 16. But several months after Roe was decided, in a tragedy unrelated to the case, McCluskey was murdered.Īnother Extremist Law That Americans Have to Live With Chavi Eve Karkowsky He had then handled the adoption of Norma’s child. McCluskey had introduced Norma to the attorney who initially filed the Roe lawsuit and who had been seeking a plaintiff. And as I discovered while writing a book about Roe, the child’s identity had been known to just one person-an attorney in Dallas named Henry McCluskey. Of course, the child had a real name too. It came to refer to the child as “the Roe baby.”

The Court’s decision alluded only obliquely to the existence of Norma’s baby: In his majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun noted that a “pregnancy will come to term before the usual appellate process is complete.” The pro-life community saw the unknown child as the living incarnation of its argument against abortion.

On January 22, 1973, when the Supreme Court finally handed down its decision, she had long since given birth-and relinquished her child for adoption. Wishing to terminate her pregnancy, she filed suit in March 1970 against Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade, challenging the Texas laws that prohibited abortion. Roe’s pseudonymous plaintiff, Jane Roe, was a Dallas waitress named Norma McCorvey. And yet for all its prominence, the person most profoundly connected to it has remained unknown: the child whose conception occasioned the lawsuit. The ruling has been contested with ever-increasing intensity, dividing and reshaping American politics. Wade secured a woman’s legal right to obtain an abortion.

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