User:Fbshaikh/Norma McCorvey

Early life
Later, McCorvey was sent to the State School for Girls in Gainesville, Texas, on and off from ages 11 to 15. She said this was the happiest time of her childhood, and every time she was sent home, would purposely do something bad to be sent back. After being released, McCorvey lived with her mother's cousin, who allegedly raped her every night for three weeks. When McCorvey's mother found out, her cousin said McCorvey was lying.

After being sent to the Catholic Boarding school in Dallas, Texas, she had experienced sexual assault for the first time from a nun at the school.

While working at a restaurant, Norma met Woody McCorvey (born 1940), and she married him at the age of 16 in 1963. She later left him after he allegedly assaulted her. She moved in with her mother and gave birth to her first child, Melissa, in 1965. After Melissa's birth, McCorvey developed a severe drinking and drug problem. Soon after, she began identifying as a lesbian. She went on a weekend trip to visit two friends and left her baby with her mother. When she returned, her mother replaced Melissa with a baby doll and reported her to the police as having abandoned her baby, and called the police to take her out of the house. She would not tell her where Melissa was for weeks, and finally let her visit her child after three months. She allowed McCorvey to move back in. One day, she woke McCorvey up after a long day of work; she told McCorvey to sign what were presented as insurance papers, and she did so without reading them. However, the papers she had signed were adoption papers, giving her mother custody of Melissa, and McCorvey was then kicked out of the house. The following year, McCorvey again became pregnant and gave birth to a baby, who was placed for adoption.

When McCorvey got pregnant for the second time, it was after an affair with a male colleague who was later put up for adoption. After the adoption, she went back to drinking and using drugs heavily. When she got pregnant with her third child, AKA the Jane Roe baby, it was with her friend. With many years of drinking, heavy drug use and mental and physical abuse, she hadn't been happy with the pregnancy. Wanting to abort, she was looking for an abortion clinic which happened to be shut down. This led to the meeting with her lawyers and sticking to the rape story.

Roe v. Wade
Eventually, McCorvey was referred to attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, who were looking for pregnant women who were seeking abortions. The case, Roe v. Wade (Henry Wade was the district attorney), took three years of trials to reach the Supreme Court of the United States, and McCorvey never attended a single trial.

To get the case to be in their favor, Weddington played upon the judge and the jury's emotions by telling her life story. "Unmarried and in her third year of law school, she unexpectedly became pregnant and decided on an abortion. The restrictions of the Texas criminal ban, allowing abortions only "by medical advice for the purpose of saving the mother," led Weddington to a back alley abortion clinic in a Mexican border town where she paid $400 in cash to an unknown doctor."

The documentary AKA Jane Roe
Abby Johnson, who worked for Planned Parenthood before joining the anti-abortion movement, said that McCorvey called her on the phone days before her death to express remorse for abortion. Johnson said that she believed McCorvey was a damaged woman who should not have been thrust into the spotlight so quickly after turning against abortion. "I don’t have any problem believing that in the last year of her life that she tried to convince herself abortion was OK. But I know at the end of her life, she did not believe that," she said.

An abortion counselor named Charlotte Taft and termed "abortion lady" by pro-choice protestors outside of her clinic, was shocked when she was presented with a clip from the interview where McCorvey makes her confession. She says, “…I don’t know how she came to terms with, betrayal, the betrayal that she did.” Having heard this, Taft said McCorvey had risked the Supreme Court ruling to be overturned and many women be forced to have abortions in unsafe environments and illegally again. “Thats— that really hurts, because… shakes, that’s big stakes. That’s all. It’s just really big stakes"