Norma Part 3

Something that most people don’t know, is that when the Supreme Court handed down its ruling regarding Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion nationally, it was actually rendering a decision on two separate cases.  The second was a case out of Georgia known as Doe v. Bolton.  The plaintiff, Mary Doe, whose real name was Sandra Cano, had a similar shitty background to Norma McCorvey, aka Jane Roe.  Sandra had a severe learning disability and a medical condition which made part of her face droop.  When she was seventeen, she was forced to marry a gas station attendant after he knocked her up, even though he was a convicted child molester who continually violated his probation.  As a result of this little factoid, Sandra’s first three children were moved into foster care and Sandra had a mental breakdown, being institutionalized for a time before escaping.  In 1969, pregnant with her fourth child, Sandra went to a lawyer named Margie Hames to see about getting a divorce.  However, Hames, more interested in challenging Georgia’s abortion law, lied to Sandra and had her sign documents which she never read, which kicked off Doe v. Bolton.  Hames then signed Sandra up for an abortion she didn’t want, leading to Sandra fleeing the state for six months in the mistaken belief that Hames could force her to kill her baby.  Despite this, the case continued forward clear to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sandra didn’t fully understand her role in the case until her cause was taken up by anti-abortion advocates a year after the verdict.  Decidedly anti-abortion, this led to her becoming a loud advocate for the appeal of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, a call that gained strength in the 1980’s with the growth of the Christian evangelical movement.  This was decidedly not all that great for the pro-abortion movement, which responded by revealing to the world that Norma McCorvey was Jane Roe.  Though she was a little rough around the edges, by which I mean she reeked of booze and had a foul mouth, she was pro-abortion.  Norma, who was not a big fan of working as a housekeeper, enjoyed her new celebrity status, hitting the interview and advocacy circuit, proudly telling people how her quest to get an abortion after getting raped had changed the world.  Unfortunately, her story became much less popular in 1987 when she admitted in an interview that her pregnancy had not been the result of rape.

As a result of Norma’s less than truthful narrative, she drifted back into obscurity for a time.  However, she missed the limelight, so in 1989 made up a story that an anti-abortion advocate fired a shotgun at the house she shared with her partner, Connie Gonzalez.  This put her back in the pro-abortion camp’s good graces.  Facing both a Supreme Court case trying to limit abortions and Sandra trying to overturn Doe v. Bolton on the grounds that she had been lied to, both of which ultimately failed, it was decided to once again overlook Norma’s alcoholism and instability.  Norma was bigger than ever, hob knobbing with celebrities, giving political endorsements, creating a foundation, having a movie made about her, and writing an autobiography.  However, nothing lasts forever, and by 1995, the money for interviews had largely dried up again and the pro-abortion community had mostly gone back to ignoring Norma, leaving her with little beyond a low paying job at a local abortion clinic.  It was at this point that Norma switched sides, announcing she had become a born again Christian who was fervently against abortion.

Now this might seem a bit confusing, until you realize it was all about the money.  As it turned out, the anti-abortion talk circuit was more lucrative, so Norma changed sides, not only switching her stance on abortion, but also announcing that she was no longer a lesbian and that Connie, her partner of over twenty years, was now just a platonic friend and roommate.  Norma fully transformed herself into an anti-abortion advocate, writing a new autobiography to counter her first version, starring in an anti-abortion movie, and even getting arrested at anti-abortion protests.  However, though she helped raised millions of dollars for the cause, she received only a pittance in return, at one point even asking supporters to send her money so she and Connie could buy food.  Connie remained in the picture until 2004, when Norma left her after she suffered a stroke.  Norma died in 2017 at the age of 69.  On her deathbed she admitted in her interview that her anti-abortion activism had been all an act which she did because doing it made money.  As for Sandra, she attempted to get Doe v. Bolton overturned again in 2000 and 2006, failing again both times.  Her claim of her lawyer committing fraud never legally recognized, she died in 2014 at the age of 67.

Even after death, both Norma McCorvey and Sandra Cano are claimed to be both heroes and villains by both sides of the abortion debate.  In the end, neither women was really either of these things.  Rather, they were just two women of little means who got swept up into something far bigger than themselves, one spending the rest of her life trying to escape it and the other trying to take advantage of it.  This isn’t a story meant to shed light on the ethics of allowing or banning abortions.  This is a story of meant to highlight that history is a messy thing, the examination of which leaves little to nothing pure or unscathed.

Norma Part 2

During the late 1950’s, a drug called Thalidomide became popular worldwide as an alternative to aspirin.  It was basically seen as a cure all for whatever might ail somebody, with one popular use being alleviating the symptoms of morning sickness during pregnancy.  Unfortunately, it was soon after discovered that the drug could cause severe birth defects and it was banned in most countries by 1962.  Though never approved for use in the United States, it was widely distributed for testing purposes, including to pregnant women.  One of these women was Sherri Finkbine, an upper middle class white woman living in Phoenix.  Fearing her baby would be deformed, she decided to get an abortion, which was illegal in Arizona and most other states, leading to her travelling to Sweden to have the procedure done.  Her story became a national news sensation, garnering a great deal of pity for her plight and sparking the first widespread calls to change laws regarding abortion in the United States.

It should probably be understood that throughout the history of the United States, abortions most certainly took place.  When the country was first founded, it was not an uncommon practice amongst people of all social classes, who used various old wives’ methods to terminate unwanted pregnancies.  However, this began to change in the mid-nineteenth century when a religious revival shifted the practice from something people just kind of took care of in private to a direct ticket to eternal damnation.  Fun fact, this same religious revival led to a huge jump in support for the abolition of slavery, which just goes to show you that history is a complicated mess.  Anyways, starting in the late nineteenth century, states began licensing physicians, you know, because having random people providing healthcare probably wasn’t the best idea.  Many of these newly licensed doctors became major opponents of abortion, not because they really gave a damn, but mostly because most abortions were done by unlicensed healers and various other quacks.  As a result, by the start of the twentieth century getting an abortion was a felony crime across the U.S.

Now of course it should go without saying that though illegal, abortions still totally happened.  However, since they were illegal, getting an abortion involved either spending a lot of money to get a procedure done by a seedy maybe doctor with no qualms about skirting the law or utilizing various questionable home remedies.  In both cases there was a significant amount of risk to women’s health and deaths were not uncommon.  However, the women most negatively affected were mostly poor, so of course nobody really gave two shits about it.  That didn’t really change until the Thalidomide scare followed closely by an epidemic of German measles, which could cause severe birth defects, which made the possibility of needing an abortion very real for middle class American women.  Since most families couldn’t afford a quick jaunt over to Europe, a movement to legalize abortion gained strength, becoming a central tenant of second wave feminism.  Colorado became the first state to legalize abortion in 1967, followed soon after by California and several other states.  However, the legislatures in most states remained firmly entrenched against legalization, supported by religious and other such socially conservative organizations.

In states where lawmakers were resistant to legalizing abortions, feminists turned towards a more judicial strategy, bringing forward cases to challenge abortion laws in court.  The hope was to not only legalize abortion in specific states, but to eventually get a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.  A similar strategy had been quite effective during the Civil Rights movement earlier that decade.  Unfortunately, finding women who were willing to become a face for abortion proved harder than expected.  The widespread stigma of not only abortion, but also even publicly talking about sex, made the majority of women less than willing to step forward.  Most women who publicly talked about getting abortions, didn’t do it until well after the fact.  The dream client would have been similar to Sherri Finkbine; married, well to do, and white.  However, these were the same women who could easily afford to cross state lines to get an abortion and who were the most concerned about sullying their reputations.  This left the poor and unreputable, people who were desperate and had little to lose if their identities were discovered.  However, it was a very real concern that the less than stellar reputation of such women could sink a case.  A ridiculous amount of court cases depend upon the ability of a lawyer to create sympathy for their client.  Luckily, this little problem could be gotten around by never actually having the client appear in court.  Using the excuse of the need to protect the women’s identities, Finkbine had received death threats, feminist lawyers found a perfect way to keep their clients out of the public eye.

One such woman was of course Norma McCorvey, who under the pseudonym Jane Roe was the plaintiff in what eventually became the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling which legalized abortion nationwide.  Though her treatment by her lawyers was very much less than stellar, it paled compared to the women involved in other important abortion court cases, some of which were outright lied to by their lawyers.  As is unfortunately true for many human rights movements, ethics regarding how individuals are treated often get overshadowed by a zealousness to do what is right for the masses.

Norma Part 1

Norma Nelson, who grew up in Houston, was a precocious child who at the age of ten robbed a gas station and then ran away to Oklahoma City with a friend, where the two girls somehow managed to convince a hotel worker to let them rent a room.  This little adventure came to an end when a maid caught her and her friend kissing and had the two arrested.  It was the late 1950’s, things were fricking weird back then.  Norma was declared a ward of the state and sent to a juvenile prison school, which was what she wanted in the first place.  Her mother was a violent alcoholic, and her father was a TV repairman involved in a methodical disappearing act that culminated when she was thirteen.  The nail in the coffin was when her parents decided to send her to a strict Catholic boarding school, which was apparently worse than the juvenile prison school because every time she was released Norma did another crime to get back in.

Unfortunately, such hijinks had to stop when Norma turned sixteen, because that’s when Texas recognized people as adults who could be sent to real prison.  Not really wanting to live with her mean drunk mother, Norma got a job at a restaurant and moved in with a cousin who proceeded to rape her for three weeks straight, though nobody believed her because Norma had a proclivity for lying about all sorts of stuff.  Wanting to get out of this situation, Norma married a man named Woody McCorvey who was seven years her senior.  After two years of marriage, Woody knocked Norma up, but she soon after left because he also hit her during an argument.  With nowhere else to go, Norma moved in with her mother and had her first child at the age of seventeen.  Norma celebrated by declaring she was a lesbian and then developing a severe drinking and drug problem.  Her mother responded to this by at first trying to outright steal the baby, hiding it from Norma for three months, and when that didn’t work getting her to sign away her parental rights by waiting until Norma was high as shit and telling her she was signing insurance papers.  She then kicked Norma out of the house.

Norma pretty much became a drifter after that, moving down to Dallas and doing whatever she could for a place to stay and to get her hands on more booze and drugs.  She became pregnant with her second child when she was nineteen, but gave the baby up for adoption, then became pregnant again when she was twenty-one.  It was at this point that some friends talked her into claiming she got raped so she could get an abortion.  At the time, Texas only allowed abortions in very limited circumstances and the U.S. was a patchwork of state laws varying from no abortions whatsoever to all the abortions all the time.  This being Texas in the late 1960’s, Norma went with the claim that a group of Black men had gang raped her.  Strangely enough for the day, nobody believed her, and so she was unable to get an abortion.  It was at this time that two feminist lawyers named Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington found her.  Coffee and Weddington wanted to mount a legal challenge against Texas’ abortion law and were looking for any woman willing to let them represent her in court.  Norma, desperate for an abortion, agreed.

It should probably be mentioned right now that Coffee and Weddington didn’t give two shits about Norma.  For them she was a means to an end and nothing else.  When the case was filed, they gave Norma the pseudonym Jane Roe.  This was ostensibly done to protect her identity, but in truth it was because they were worried that people being able to identify Norma as their client might hurt their case.  Norma was an unemployed alcoholic drug addict who slept around to keep a roof over her head, resulting in three pregnancies with three different men.  While arguably one of the exact reasons women should be given options to deal with unwanted pregnancies as they choose, Coffee and Weddington wanted the judges to imagine their wives and daughters when they thought about the case, not the shit show messed up girl from down the block.  Over the five years the case wound its way through the legal system, Norma never once stepped foot in a courtroom.  In addition, Coffee and Weddington never told her how long the legal case would likely last.  Norma never got an abortion, instead having the baby and giving it up for adoption.

Norma’s case eventually culminated in the famous Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, when by a 7 to 2 margin the Supreme Court made abortions legal nationwide, at least through the first trimester of pregnancy, while allowing states to have various increasingly stringent rules regarding the second and third trimesters.  Norma learned about this verdict like everyone else by reading it in the newspaper.  By that time Norma was still living in Dallas, barely scraping by via working as a housekeeper.  Though still a heavy drinker, she had managed to get her drug problem under control and had started a long-term relationship with a woman named Connie Gonzalez who she lived with.  The fact that Norma was Jane Doe didn’t become common knowledge until the early 1980’s.