Jane Roe Settles Into New Life of Her Own

Norma McCorvey--whom most of us know better as the Jane Roe of Roe vs. Wade--has been living quietly in Orange County for the last six months, which is just the way she wants it. She left Dallas last year in a volley of gunfire and hard feelings, and she has no desire to risk that again. For the first time since she became by pure accident two decades ago the central figure in one of the most controversial decisions ever handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, she has found some inner peace.

During her six months in Orange County, Norma and I have renewed an old friendship. We met 17 years ago in Dallas, when I was sent by Good Housekeeping magazine to interview the two young women attorneys who argued Roe vs. Wade through the Supreme Court. After several days in Dallas, it was clear to me that the core of the story was in the identity of Jane Roe, and I pleaded with her attorneys to let me talk with her. They finally agreed to a brief meeting with her at my hotel if I would agree unequivocally to protect her identity.

I had no idea, then, how frightened Norma McCorvey was or how totally she operated on her instincts. But we connected that first night, and she invited me to the home she shared with a tough, protective woman named Connie Gonzales, who turned out to be a lot more difficult to win over. From that first meeting developed a friendship with Norma that has been sustained by letters and a strong sense of mutual trust. The article I wrote for Good Housekeeping told her story--highly embellished, as I was to learn many years later--without revealing her name. And it was the only interview she granted for more than seven years.

So even though I hadn’t seen her since 1973, it was easy and natural for us to resume our friendship when she moved to Orange County. And there were also some questions that needed to be asked to renew the sense of mutual trust.

Before those questions were asked, Norma sat at the kitchen table of her Orange County condominium and told me, almost dreamily: “I’m much more comfortable with myself. I know where I’m going and who I’m going there with. I’ve never allowed that before, always felt that I had to appear very strong, never allowed any feelings or emotions. Now I know I can just be me, and I finally have a sense of peace.”

“Just being me” meant to Norma McCorvey searching for and finding the Roe baby. It meant admitting that she is a lesbian and living openly and happily a lifestyle she has embraced for many years but never acaknowledged even to herself. It meant breaking away from the love-hate tentacles of Dallas and some of the people deeply embedded in her life there. It meant admitting the lies that almost drove her to suicide and purging them finally from her psyche. It meant dealing frontally with the fear of being a public figure that almost paralyzed her at its worst and left her acutely uncomfortable at its best.

She’s still uncomfortable, still scared, still wary, still angry at those who would put her down, still lives by her instincts of who to trust, still reaches for bravado when she feels insecure. But there is a new and growing awareness of strength and an ability to cope. She has an oversized button over the dressing table in her bedroom that says: “Enjoy life; this is not a dress rehearsal.” She’s beginning to believe it. And to do it.

Norma McCorvey is the quintessential example of a totally ill-prepared person being accidentally thrust into the public limelight. We make demands on these people that they usually have no capacity to fulfill. More often than not, it destroys them. It almost--but not quite--destroyed Norma McCorvey.

Her story is well-known and need not be repeated here.

For seven years after I first interviewed her, Norma and Connie had run several service businesses--housecleaning, painting, small construction--in complete anonymity. Then in 1980, Norma--who had turned down dozens of requests for interviews made through her attorneys--impulsively granted one to a Dallas TV newscaster and blew her cover forever.

Since then, she has been the subject of innumerable articles and a two-hour TV movie. She has also suffered spells of such powerful self-hatred and depression that she tried several times to kill herself.

She showed me faint scars on her wrists where she had slashed them in her last attempt three years ago.

“I had always suffered from severe depression ever since my mother kept telling me how stupid I was when I was growing up. All that was made so much worse by the lies I told about the Roe baby. A Supreme Court case grew out of those lies, and even though I knew the way I got pregnant had nothing to do with the decision, I was scared.”

The lie was Norma’s insistence that the Roe pregnancy grew out of a rape. Unknowingly, I helped Norma create that lie. She had told it first to the Dallas doctor from whom she requested an abortion because she thought she would have a better chance if she said that she had been raped. Then she repeated it to the attorneys who used her pregnancy to try to rid Texas of its restrictive abortion law. But she hadn’t really refined it until I sat with her in Connie Gonzales’ kitchen a month after Roe vs. Wade was handed down.

I have on tape her graphic account of the rape that allegedly took place in a rural Georgia town where the carnival for which Norma was working had put down briefly. I insisted on details--the weather, what the man was wearing, what was said, exactly where the attack took place--and Norma provided them expansively and, as it turned out, creatively.

A sample will illustrate. Said Norma in 1973: “Suddenly I turned around and saw this big old guy coming at me, and I was alone. Couldn’t see the other two girls anywhere. He said, ‘It’s just you and me now.’ He was big, the biggest of the three men who came after us. I knew what was gonna happen. We’re along the side of the road, on a gravel berm. He slapped me a couple of times, and then he hit me. I had a terrible black eye. I could hear the others screaming, but I couldn’t see them. . . .”

There was much, much more, and 17 years later, in Orange County, I played Norma’s words back for her. She listened with a kind of bemused wonderment, several times shaking her head in disbelief at her own imagination.

When I asked her if any of it was true, she answered: “Not much. I was with the carnival all right, and we were hassled by three guys at a little town in Georgia, but that’s all. I got pregnant with the Roe baby after an affair in Dallas, before I took off with the carnival. When I found out I was pregnant, I went back to Dallas to try and get an abortion.

“For years after that, I was stuck with the rape story, and every time I had to tell it, I’d be terribly depressed for weeks afterward. I was brought up not to lie, and because of this story I had to lie all the time. And the depression periods got deeper and longer until the night I cut my wrists.”

That near-tragedy was a kind of watershed for Norma. She’s fuzzy on dates, but she says it was soon after she recovered that she told columnist Carl Rowan--interviewing her for a TV documentary--that she had lied about the Roe baby being conceived in rape. (Published accounts set the date of the interview in June, 1987, and the airing of the program three months later.) It was the beginning of Norma’s turnaround. Purged finally of this lie, she sought psychiatric help--and found it.

“The doctor showed me,” she recalls, “that it was my mother and father who had the problems, not me. Although my dad was always supportive, I held onto my childhood because I wanted my mother to love me, wanted her respect and never felt like I got it. The doctor told me it was OK to be an adult and that every day didn’t have gloom and doom hanging over it. He helped me step out of my childhood into an adult role, without stopping in between.”

As the healing process took place, Norma found herself cast as an unlikely icon in the escalating war between anti-abortion and pro-abortion forces, much of it unpleasant.

Norma says that baby clothes were strewn frequently in her yard, and she was called “baby-killer” and spat on in public places in Dallas. All this culminated in an attack on the house that she and Connie shared. On April 4, 1989, in the early morning hours, someone shotgunned Norma’s car sitting in the driveway, and when she got up to investigate, fired a blast through her front window. (The assailants were never caught.) Although Norma wasn’t hurt, she was badly frightened, and soon after that, she left both Dallas and Connie, she says for good.

“Connie and I had been drifting apart for a long time,” Norma told me. “I still talk to her on the phone and just the other day I invited her out to visit. A lot of my stuff is still in her house. But it was time to move on.”

Norma visited a friend in Northern California, liked it there, and moved to the Santa Rosa area last year. There she met a woman we’ll call Diane--a biologist working on an advanced degree--with whom she is now living. Norma and Diane--a tall, pleasant, rather scholarly looking woman who doesn’t want to be identified--moved to Orange County in February. For the first time, Norma is with someone her own age who shares her interests and has brought lightness into her life. The effect has been both welcome and purgative.

“Connie,” says Norma, “never allowed me to deal with the fact that I was gay. I felt for years that people would think badly of me. Now I don’t really care any more. I didn’t know I could come out and be comfortable, and I did--and finally found some peace with myself. Yeah, I’m a lesbian. No big deal. Now let’s get on to the next subject.”

All of this, however, has contributed to the difficulty of the pro-abortion Establishment in embracing Norma as a standard-bearer of their movement. This volatile, poorly educated former car-hop and carny worker just doesn’t fit their picture very comfortably, even when garnished with Holly Hunter playing her in a TV movie.

When Norma appeared in Washington, D.C., last year to take part in the abortion-rights demonstration sponsored by the National Organization for Women, she says the NOW movers and shakers stiffed her. Norma is still angry about that. “One of them,” she says, “told a Newsweek reporter they didn’t recognize me as a public symbol because I hadn’t been out in the trenches long enough. But who in hell do they think dug the first hole?”

Norma’s vulnerability makes her both easy and difficult to exploit. Easy because she spent most of her troubled life seeking some small measure of respect and affection and dignity and affirmation and still hungers for it. Difficult because she has been hurt and used so many times that she has now become aggressively suspicious of almost every approach from strangers.

Norma’s world today is black and white, good guys and bad guys. She is full of bravado about her dealings with the bad guys--pushing her way onto the NOW platform in Washington, for example--but the bravado only underscores her vulnerability to those to whom she offers trust.

Probably her greatest fear today is the threat of the current U.S. Supreme Court to diminish or even negate the impact of Roe vs. Wade. If this decision had been repealed by the Supreme court a few years ago, a large part of Norma McCorvey--who finally found real validity in the role of Jane Roe--would have been repealed, too. But no longer. There would be enormous disappointment, but Norma would no longer feel destroyed. She has finally found an identity of her own.

From that place, she is building a new relationship with her mother (“She even made me my favorite dinner when I went home to visit last month”), solidifying an old one with her father, and creating a new one with her daughter, Melissa, by a teen-age marriage, and Norma’s 3-year-old granddaughter, whose picture she proudly showed me.

Much of life for Norma, now 43, is given over to the Jane Roe Women’s Center--or rather her dream of a center that “would help women understand their rights and how to act on that information.” The center has neither funding nor facilities at the moment, but several feminist groups are eager to help, and Norma is optimistic.

Meanwhile, her only source of income is from the speeches she gives several times a month, mostly before college and social action groups. She detoured into a high school in Corona a few months ago--a Right to Know world history course at Centennial High--and predictably attracted a group of anti-abortion adults who audited the class and tried to question her but were cut off by the teacher running the class, who said: “This is for the kids; let’s keep it that way.”

Norma says she is more comfortable with this sort of thing than she used to be, “although I still get stressed out when I speak, and my stomach keeps turning over.”

By far the most frequent question asked her is: “Do you know where the Roe baby is?” Until a year ago, she could honestly say, “No,” but now she tries to be noncommittal, because she does know but is “bound by a letter of confidentiality” not to disclose the information.

She says she wasn’t secure enough with herself to take this step until the spring of 1989, when she started the search. “I had to know,” she told me, “if she was OK, if the promises made to me in the hospital had been kept.

“The attorney who handled the adoption is dead and his records are sealed, but I found other means of getting the information. I found out that the baby is a girl who graduated from high school last year. Although I’ve never seen her, she knows who she is, and I’ve put it out there that I’m here and would like to see her. I was ready last spring, but she wasn’t. When she is ready, I’ll hear from her. Meanwhile, I want to keep it very low-key.”

That’s also the way Norma wants to keep her life now: low-key. She’s had enough limelight for a lifetime--limelight she neither sought nor wanted and that has frequently been a cause of both discomfort and pain.

Comfort is very attractive to Norma and to that end she and Diane are moving back to Northern California next month, to an old residential area of Oakland. Neither of them ever felt comfortable in Orange County “because,” Norma says, “the culture here seems so close to Dallas, and I want to get as far away from Dallas as I possibly can.”

In Oakland, Norma will be close to the people who are helping her fund and organize her Women’s Center. And she also plans to go back to school. She phoned me excitedly a few days ago to tell me she had just been presented an honorary degree by the New College Law School of San Francisco. She read me the citation that accompanied the degree and insisted that I write it down.

It read, in part: “The trustees of the college confer upon Norma McCorvey the degree of doctor of law, honoris causa , in recognition of your courageous refusal to allow Texas politicians, religious fundamentalists or Supreme Court justices to deprive women of their autonomy and human dignity. And in recognition of your continuing efforts to speak out on behalf of . . . a more humane world.”

Norma says she’s going to enroll in New College in the fall “to learn to be a paralegal so I can work with people who don’t have money.”

It’s been a long journey to this place for Norma McCorvey, and we almost pushed her over the edge half a dozen times. But she survived and grew and finally emerged into the sunlight of honest self-awareness. She’s one of the lucky ones--and I’m very glad I could be in on both the beginning and end of this journey.