NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
In 1970, a troubled, pregnant 22-year-old Norma McCorvey signed her name to an affidavit. Two lawyers then took that affidavit, gave McCorvey the pseudonym Jane Roe, and made her the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade.
That case eventually made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in its 1973 ruling on Roe v. Wade declared abortion a fundamental right. McCorvey spent the next two decades supporting abortion rights. But in 1995, while working at a Dallas abortion clinic, she encountered the group Operation Rescue. Soon afterward, her thinking about the case tried in her name dramatically changed.
She described that change in her 1998 book, Won by Love: “I was sitting in [Operation Rescue’s] offices when I noticed a fetal development poster…I kept seeing the picture of that tiny, 10-week-old embryo, and I said to myself, “That’s a baby!”…I felt crushed under the truth of this realization. I had to face up to the awful reality. Abortion wasn’t about “products of conception.” It wasn’t about “missed periods.” It was about children being killed in their mother’s wombs. All those years I was wrong. Signing that affidavit, I was wrong. Working in an abortion clinic, I was wrong. No more of this first trimester, second trimester, third trimester stuff. Abortion—at any point—was wrong. It was so clear. Painfully clear.”
Three years after that experience, on August 17, 1998, McCorvey entered the Catholic Church. She remained a committed pro-life activist, working to overturn the Supreme Court case she helped launch, until her death in February 2017.
