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Pro-Choice Crowd Demonstrating at Abortion Rights March

Source: Viviane Moos / Getty

McCorvey, who went public with her experiences in the 1980’s, later converted to Christianity in the 1990’s and had regretted her role in the ruling.

 

KATY, TEXAS – Norma McCorvey, known as “Jane Roe,” the anonymous plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, the US Supreme Court case that established a constitutional right to abortion, has died, a priest close to her family said Saturday. She later became an anti-abortion activist.

McCorvey died in the Houston area with her daughter Melissa and several grandchildren present, said the Rev. Frank Pavone, an anti-abortion activist.

Pavone did not give the cause of death but said McCorvey had been a heavy smoker and had respiratory problems. She had been in and out of assisted living facilities over the past year.

“Norma has been a friend of mine, and of Priests for Life, for more than 20 years,” Pavone said, referring to a Catholic anti-abortion group. He said she later came “to be genuinely sorry” for her role in the famous abortion decision.

She began her association with one of the nation’s most contentious and volatile sociopolitical issues in 1970 when she became the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit challenging strict anti-abortion laws in Texas.

The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which handed down its controversial ruling in January 1973. The decision legalized the right to an abortion in all 50 states and sparked a political debate that remains charged to this day.

McCorvey, who was on her third pregnancy, never had an abortion and gave birth to a girl, who was given up for adoption.

In the 1980s, she went public with her identity and wrote a book titled “I Am Roe: My Life, Roe v. Wade, and Freedom of Choice.”

In the book, McCorvey, a ninth-grade dropout, describes a tough life, explaining that she suffered physical and emotional abuse as a child, spent some time in reform school in Gainesville, Texas, and was raped as a teenager. A husband whom she married at 16 later beat her. She also tells of her alcohol and drug abuse and experiences with lovers of both sexes.

Her first child, Melissa, was raised by her mother; her second child was raised by the father, and the couple agreed that McCorvey would never contact her.

 

READ MORE: Fox8.com

Article Courtesy of CNN and WJW Fox 8 News Cleveland

Picture Courtesy of Viviane Moos and Getty Images

R.I.P. Norma “Jane Roe” McCorvey of “Roe vs. Wade” Has Passed Away  was originally published on wzakcleveland.com