For more than four decades now there has been no more divisive issue where the public interest and personal right to privacy have collided in the United States than the legalization of abortion in 1973.
And that may be about the only thing the two sides in the ongoing incendiary debate can agree on.
“Norma McCorvey, who was 22, unwed, mired in addiction and poverty, and desperate for a way out of an unwanted pregnancy,” as the Washington Post noted in a story earlier today, when she became “Jane Roe, the pseudonymous plaintiff of the 1973 United States Supreme Court decision” in Jane Roe et al., Appellants v. Henry Wade, district attorney of Dallas, which, in a 7-2 landmark decision more than 44 years ago now, establishing a constitutional right to an abortion, has died at an assisted-living facility in Katy, Tex. She was 69.
McCorvey, who had three children, never did have an abortion – a fact unknown to many. The United States Supreme Court didn’t rule in her favour in what had become a class-action lawsuit until her third child, which she placed for adoption, was 2½ years old.
McCorvey was received into the Catholic Church at St. Thomas Aquinas in Dallas in 1998. Hers was an often messy and complicated life. She was no plaster saint but rather another sinner, like all of us, with more than a little history and more than welcome in what might now well be called Pope Francis’ “field hospital.”
Norma McCorvey’s was an extraordinary life redeemed by unexpected grace. After her conversion to Christianity in 1995, to hear her proclaim the simple but powerful declaration, “I am Jane Roe,” took on a whole new electrifying meaning for the pro-life or anti-abortion movement, with the “pro” or “anti” depending largely on whose constructing the heatedly-contested narrative at a given moment.
Requiescat in pace, Norma McCorvey.
soundingsjohnbarker 