In the late s McCorvey became an activist, which provided her with income and attention as well as threats and intimidation. In , four days after someone allegedly shot at her and Gonzalez in their Dallas home, she spoke at a large abortion rights rally in Washington, D. Allred, a civil rights attorney, became a friend, who helped her curtail her drug and alcohol use and navigate the world of media and fundraising.
Both were short-lived. In August Benham baptized her. In the months following, she renounced homosexuality, publicly reversed her position on abortion, and started working for Operation Rescue. Now an anti-abortion activist, McCorvey claimed she had been manipulated by Coffee and Weddington and treated badly by the pro-choice movement. She protested at abortion clinics in Dallas and spoke at rallies and demonstrations.
In and she urged the United States Senate and the U. Supreme Court to reverse the Roe v. Wade decision. She also converted to Roman Catholicism and traveled internationally to speak to Catholic organizations. Supreme Court, and during the presidential election, she appeared in television ads against the re-election of Barack Obama.
After her death, she again made news. The Handbook of Texas Women project has its own dedicated website and resources. Brownwood Bulletin , January 28, The Facts Clute, Texas , August 22, Miami Herald , January 22, New York Times , February 18, Odessa American , January 21, Shelley was 15 when she noticed that her hands sometimes shook.
She could make them still by eating. But the tremor would return. She simply continued on. Decades after her father left home, it would occur to Shelley that the genesis of her unease preceded his disappearance. In fact, it preceded her birth. She knew only, she explained, that she wanted to one day find a partner who would stay with her always. And she wanted to become a secretary, because a secretary lived a steady life. In , Shelley graduated from Highline High and enrolled in secretarial school.
One year later, her birth mother started to look for her. She had revealed her identity as Jane Roe days after the Roe decision, in , but almost a decade elapsed before she began to commit herself to the pro-choice movement. Her name was not yet widely known when, shortly before the march, three bullets pierced her home and car.
Norma blamed the shooting on Roe , but it likely had to do with a drug deal. A woman had recently accused Norma of shortchanging her in a marijuana sale. Norma landed in the papers. The feminist lawyer Gloria Allred approached her at the Washington march and took her to Los Angeles for a run of talks, fundraisers, and interviews. Soon after, Norma announced that she was hoping to find her third child, the Roe baby. In a television studio in Manhattan, the Today host Jane Pauley asked Norma why she had decided to look for her.
Norma struggled to answer. Some 20 years had passed since Norma had conceived her third child, yet she had begun searching for that child only a few weeks after retaining a prominent lawyer. And she was not looking for her second child.
She was seeking only the one associated with Roe. Norma had no sooner announced her search than The National Enquirer offered to help. The tabloid turned to a woman named Toby Hanft. Hanft died in , but two of her sons spoke with me about her life and work, and she once talked about her search for the Roe baby in an interview. Toby Hanft knew what it was to let go of a child. She had given birth in high school to a daughter whom she had placed for adoption, and whom she later looked for and found.
And she began working to connect other women with the children they had relinquished. Hanft often relied on information not legally available: Social Security numbers, birth certificates.
Hanft paid them to scan microfiche birth records for the asterisks that might denote an adoption. And she delivered. By —when Norma went public with her hope to find her daughter—Hanft had found more than adoptees and misidentified none.
Hanft was thrilled to get the Enquirer assignment. She opposed abortion. Finding the Roe baby would provide not only exposure but, as she saw it, a means to assail Roe in the most visceral way. She set everything else aside and worked in secrecy. McCluskey, the adoption lawyer, was dead, but Norma herself provided Hanft with enough information to start her search: the gender of the child, along with her date and place of birth.
On June 2, , 37 girls had been born in Dallas County; only one of them had been placed for adoption. Official records yielded an adoptive name. Oh my God! I found her! Hanft normally telephoned the adoptees she found.
But this was the Roe baby, so she flew to Seattle, resolved to present herself in person. She was waiting in a maroon van in a parking lot in Kent, Washington, where she knew Shelley lived, when she saw Shelley walk by. Hanft stepped out, introduced herself, and told Shelley that she was an adoption investigator sent by her birth mother.
Shelley felt a rush of joy: The woman who had let her go now wanted to know her. She began to cry. Hanft hugged Shelley. She hurried home. Fitz had been born into medicine.
The first was a pioneering pathologist who coined the term appendicitis. Fitz, too, was expected to wear a white coat, but he wanted to be a writer, and in , a decade out of college, he took a job at The National Enquirer. Fitz loved his work, and he was about to land a major scoop. The answers Shelley had sought all her life were suddenly at hand. She listened as Hanft began to tell what she knew of her birth mother: that she lived in Texas, that she was in touch with the eldest of her three daughters, and that her name was Norma McCorvey.
The name was not familiar to Shelley or Ruth. That name Shelley recognized. The bit of the movie she watched had left her with the thought that Jane Roe was indecent. Still, Shelley struggled to grasp what exactly Hanft was saying. The investigator handed Shelley a recent article about Norma in People magazine, and the reality sank in. All her life, Shelley had wanted to know the facts of her birth. Having idly mused as a girl that her birth mother was a beautiful actor, she now knew that her birth mother was synonymous with abortion.
Ruth spoke up: She wanted proof. Hanft and Fitz said that a DNA test could be arranged. But there was no mistake: Shelley had been born in Dallas Osteopathic Hospital, where Norma had given birth, on June 2, The evidence was unassailable. Hanft and Fitz had a question for Shelley: Was she pro-choice or pro-life? Two days earlier, Shelley had been a typical teenager on the brink of another summer. The question—pro-life or pro-choice?
Shelley was afraid to answer. She wondered why she had to choose a side, why anyone did. Hanft and Fitz revealed at the restaurant that they were working for the Enquirer. They explained that the tabloid had recently found the child Roseanne Barr had relinquished for adoption as a teenager, and that the pair had reunited. Fitz said he was writing a similar story about Norma and Shelley. And he was on deadline.
Shelley and Ruth were aghast. Back home, Shelley wondered if talking to Norma might ease the situation or even make the tabloid go away. A phone call was arranged. The news that Norma was seeking her child had angered some in the pro-life camp. She asked Norma about her father. Norma told her little except his first name—Bill—and what he looked like. Shelley also asked about her two half sisters, but Norma wanted to speak only about herself and Shelley, the two people in the family tied to Roe.
She told Shelley that they could meet in person. The Enquirer , she said, could help. Norma wanted the very thing that Shelley did not—a public outing in the pages of a national tabloid. Shelley now saw that she carried a great secret.
To speak of it even in private was to risk it spilling into public view. Still, she asked a friend from secretarial school named Christie Chavez to call Hanft and Fitz. The aim was to have a calm third party hear them out. Chavez took careful notes. At 18, working in a series of menial jobs, she had a second child, whom she gave up for adoption. She became pregnant again in After first claiming she had been gang-raped, thinking that might get her a legal abortion, and seeking an illegal one as well, she visited the Dallas lawyers Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee.
She was already five months pregnant. They wished to challenge the law; McCorvey wanted an abortion quickly. She later claimed she had again signed papers that she had not read, not understanding what the case would entail. McCorvey was living quietly in Dallas with her partner, Connie Gonzalez, at the time. McCorvey stepped out of the shadows in the s to counsel women at pregnancy clinics, and in became a cause celebre when she admitted in a TV interview that she had lied when she claimed to have been raped, though that played no part in the case that went to the supreme court.
But by the time her autobiography, I Am Roe, written with Andy Meisner, was published in , McCorvey had become a born-again Christian, baptised by the evangelical minister Flip Benham, the head of Operation Rescue, a leading anti-abortion campaigner.
She began campaigning fiercely against abortion, claiming she had been a pawn of her Roe v Wade lawyers. She also renounced her lesbianism, and, after the publication of her second book, Won By Love, written with Gary Thomas, in , converted once again, this time to Roman Catholicism, under the auspices of Father Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life.
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