Litigation » ‘Jane Roe’ Of Roe v. Wade Dies

‘Jane Roe’ Of Roe v. Wade Dies

February 20, 2017

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Norma McCorvey is known to most as Jane Roe, the pseudonym under which she sued for the right to have an abortion in 1970. McCorvey, who was 22-years-old at the time, could not find a doctor in Texas who would perform the procedure, which then was illegal except when the life of the mother was endangered. Attorneys Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee took up McCorvey’s case and brought her lawsuit to the U.S. Supreme Court. By the time Roe v. Wade was decided in a 7-2 decision in 1973 that invalidated state bans on the procedure, McCorvey had already carried her child to term and given it up for adoption. McCorvey maintained her anonymity for a decade after the ruling, but then came out in the 1980s while speaking out as a staunch defender of abortion rights, publishing a memoir in the mid-1990s. McCorvey became a born-again Christian and went to work for Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion group after that. She died this week of heart failure at age 69.

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