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. But it would not kill the story. Ruth turned to a lawyer, a friend of a friend. He suggested that Hanft may have secretly recorded her; Shelley, he said, should trust no one. He sent a letter to the Enquirer , demanding that the paper publish no identifying information about his client and that it cease contact with her. But it cautioned her again that cooperation was the safest option.
Shelley felt stuck. To come out as the Roe baby would be to lose the life, steady and unremarkable, that she craved. Norma, too, was upset. Her plan for a Roseanne-style reunion was coming apart.
She decided to try to patch things up. Gloria Allred … has sent a letter to the Nat. But there is also great sadness, particularly surrounding her relationship with Gonzalez, which she renounced after her conversion in As an impoverished, uneducated woman lacking the means to travel out of state or obtain an illegal procedure, she was an ideal plaintiff for the lawyers who tried the case, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee. But it would take three years before the Supreme Court would render a verdict, by which time McCorvey had long since given birth to a girl who was placed for adoption.
Her second child had also been placed for adoption; her first child was raised by her mother. I had a baby, but I gave her away. But to the leaders of the abortion rights movement, the inconsistencies in her story — for a time McCorvey claimed she had gotten pregnant as the result of a rape, then said she had been lying — and lack of polish made her a less-than-ideal poster girl for the cause.
In , she was working at a Dallas abortion clinic that was targeted for demonstrations by Operation Rescue, a militant organization known for extreme tactics such as blockading clinics the group is now known as Operation Save America. She struck up an unlikely friendship with Flip Benham, an evangelical minister, who baptized her in a backyard pool, and for the next two decades of her life was a fixture at antiabortion protests and in documentaries.
Despite her visible role in the fight against abortion, McCorvey says she was a mercenary, not a true believer. Schenck expresses regret at targeting McCorvey, someone whose vulnerabilities could be easily exploited, he says.
The jig is up. Where: FX When: 9 p. Meredith Blake is an entertainment reporter for the Los Angeles Times based out of New York City, where she primarily covers television.
A native of Bethlehem, Pa. Invitations to speak at pro-choice rallies stopped coming. And when, several years later, she found out that Weddington herself had had an abortion and worked with an abortion referral network, it deepened those seeds of resentment. She became convinced that Weddington could have done more to help her.
A Christian pregnancy crisis center run by Operation Rescue, an extreme anti-abortion group, opened up next door. McCorvey became friends with the daughter of one of the anti-abortion center workers, a little girl named Emily. The child was disarming, and the two formed a relationship that McCorvey had never been able to have with her own children.
Flip Benham, who ran the crisis center and sensed what a coup it would be to convert her, gifted her a Bible. Despite what she had said in public, McCorvey had long felt conflicted about her role in legalizing abortion. She was haunted by the decision to give her daughters up, by the sight of playgrounds, and by visions of the procedures that her lawsuit had helped enable; in a radio interview in June , she had told Terry Gross that she once saw blood on the floor of a recently closed abortion clinic.
It was another later-in-life revision of her story, but one that suggested she was already starting to believe in the pro-life nightmare of what those spaces looked like. In , she got baptized and began proselytizing about the mass murder of babies that she had helped bring about. The pro-life movement made political capital of her conversion: They had convinced the woman at the center of Roe to switch sides.
They told her who her mother was, and pressured her to go public with her own opinions on abortion. Shelley never forgave her, and the anger she harbored toward McCorvey haunted her for years, preventing her from developing relationships with her biological sisters. Almost anyone who worked with McCorvey came to realize the limits of trying to make her into a political symbol—driven not by ideals so much as by her own personal sense of pain, anger, and betrayal, she was prone to outbursts, frequently off message, incapable of being a spokesperson.
Toward the end of her life, she started to say, again, that abortion should be legal through the first trimester, and believed that Trump would succeed in outlawing it. Of course, she spun this final reversal to maximum effect. The filmmakers asked if her pro-life turn had been an act. McCorvey said that it was. Does it matter that the woman at the center of Roe v. Wade changed her mind? But he prioritizes his work over his family, bringing an end to his marriage. Weddington takes ever greater credit for her role in Roe , eventually all but erasing Coffee from the litigation that was her most significant achievement.
Coffee struggles with money and career management to such a great extent that, when Prager tracks her down later in life, she is living in poverty with her partner in a small town in Texas.
None of the people who populate this book is a perfect hero, nor are there perfect villains: Prager makes the convincing case that Mildred Jefferson, who became president of the National Right to Life Committee and whom Ronald Reagan credited with awakening him to the horrors of abortion, found her way to a career as a pro-life spokesperson in large part because of racism. Did she personify it? I am not so sure. If Roe is overturned, it will not be because of a deeply ambivalent public, incapable of choosing sides.
It will be because a highly motivated minority has won. The Family Roe is a fascinating portrait of a woman whose life was shaped by the abortion debate. But it is not a story about a woman who had an abortion.
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