With her, all our pasts — the queer one, the feminist one, and the ostensibly straight one — become infinitely more complicated, and infinitely richer.
Norma McCorvey died on the 18th of February, 2017. Three years later, a documentary about her caused shock, consternation, and a deep sense of betrayal on all sides of the abortion debate.
Norma McCorvey was Jane Roe, the plaintiff in the 1973 landmark case Roe v. Wade, widely credited with giving American women the right to “choose” an abortion. The film is AKA Jane Roe. In truth, as we know, abortion rights today are still enormously restrictive, almost as restrictive as the day McCorvey, then twenty years old, in 1969, tried to get an abortion in Texas, where women could not legally terminate pregnancies without traveling out of state. Finding herself pregnant and with no hope from medical doctors, even though she claimed to have been raped, McCorvey found herself at a back alley abortionist’s office, a place crawling with cockroaches and caked with dirt: she took one look and feared she might not leave alive. She returned home, and eventually gave birth to a child she immediately put up for adoption.
In the intervening years, someone put her in touch with two female attorneys who were looking for the perfect woman around whom they could argue a case for abortion rights up to the third trimester: she had to be poor enough that she couldn’t make her way outside the state for an abortion. In McCorvey, they found the perfect candidate. When they won the case, they called to congratulate her and asked, Aren’t you happy? She responded, Why should I be happy? I had the baby.
In 1989, women from all over the country marched on Washington for abortion rights. Among the celebrity speakers, bristling and brimming with privilege and seething rage, were righteously indignant women like Whoopi Goldberg and Cybil Shepherd. In the meantime, McCorvey had been interviewed about her abortion and revealed that no, in fact, the pregnancy she had sought to terminate and which led to the lawsuit had never been a result of rape. As she put it bluntly, it’s what you had to do, lie, to get an abortion in those days. This, combined with her working class saltiness (she worked as a cleaning woman) and her pronounced Louisiana/Texas twang made her an unsuitable speaker in the eyes of the organisers of the march, and she was not asked to speak. The irony is that Roe v. Wade could only have succeeded with a woman like her and that none of the women who were given the opportunity to declaim the loss of abortion rights would ever have had to agitate for theirs the way she did.
As the years wore on, McCorvey’s health and finances became more precarious, and she eventually renounced her own abortion, became a born-again Christian, and found a home in the arms of the anti-abortion movement, which delightedly found its perfect poster child in her. As the evangelist Robert Schenck puts it in the documentary: In her, we had our Oscar. McCorvey would go on to campaign for anti-abortion candidates and frequently discussed her faith on television. The abortion rights movement, the same one that had refused to let her have a prominent voice despite her foundational role in what they stood for, now expressed a profound sense of betrayal. How could she?, they wondered. See, we knew we never could trust her.
And then, three years after her death, McCorvey once again horrified everyone on all sides. The documentary features footage of her revealing that she had only taken on an anti-abortion stance in exchange for money paid to her through various means by the anti-choice forces, mostly Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue organisation: the amount totalled about $450,000 over several years. In the film, McCorvey openly states that she’s in fact for abortion rights, and alternately laughs at, derides, and mocks the hypocrisy of those who thought they’d bought her views: I am a good actress, she laughs and shrugs.
All of this may not be entirely true, although the words of Robert Schenck, the only evangelist in the lot with anything like a conscience seem the most apt: I always wondered: Is she playing us? Because I know damn well we’re playing her…The jig is up.
Most people, including me, had little idea that the woman whose fictitious last name came to symbolise abortion rights never actually had the abortion she wanted. Her name and face appeared here and there mostly as a curiosity: Oh, look, there’s her, you know, the woman who was the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade or, Did you hear that the woman behind Roe is now an abortion opponent?
And most people, including me, never knew she had been involved in several lesbian affairs and relationships, including one with Connie Gonzalez, with whom she lived for thirty-five years. In their responses to the film, both The Advocate and the UK’s Pink News used the exact same words to describe her: McCorvey, who identified as a lesbian but had relationships with men as well as women….
The “but” is indicative of the mainstream gay community’s deep suspicion of anyone who can’t be identified strictly by an easily recognisable sexuality; the “but” indicates someone who can’t really be trusted. They could just as easily have written, “McCorvey, who identified as a lesbian AND had relationships with men as well as women,” but that would be too much: all of gay-and-lesbianhood might come crashing down, unable to bear the weight of indeterminancy and illegibility.
To date, despite all the proclamations of hero status that arrive each Pride month, there has been no mention of even the possibility that we ought to place Norma McCorvey in some kind of firmament that acknowledges her deeply important even if conflicting and sometimes confusing place in American history. Without her, there would be no Roe v. Wade, as flawed and inadequate as it is. With her, all our pasts—the queer one, the feminist one, and the ostensibly straight one—become infinitely more complicated, and infinitely richer.
The word “lie” comes up often in accounts about McCorvey, whose tales of herself are shot through with what we might call omissions of all sorts. But if we were to look at histories of women and queers more honestly, we would have to acknowledge that they fail to incorporate the lives of those like her: She was hated and mostly abandoned by her mother whom she declares “A bitch, a two-faced bitch!” At the tender age of ten, she ran away with a girlfriend and they somehow managed to get a hotel room where they were found kissing. This placed her in a disciplinary school for girls (which, she would later say, she loved because, as she put it, “I’d never seen so many boobs in one place”). After she got out of there, she was placed with a relative who repeatedly raped her, married a man who, she said, hit her when she got pregnant, was shunned by a movement literally built on her name, and so on. Gay and lesbian history—and a certain strand of feminist history—is based on the unimpeachable truth, or some version of it: we like our heroes to be untainted, preferably beautiful, cultured. McCorvey was not a “flawed figure”: she was a human figure, barely making it under the strains and stresses of capitalism and she, at the end, gathered all her reserves and gave a giant finger to the anti-abortion movement that thought it had managed to buy her silence.
Norma McCorvey was a lesbian, Norma McCorvey was not a lesbian, Norma McCorvey was unable to bear fidelity to the truth, Norma McCorvey told the truth like no one else.
Her name was Norma McCorvey, and we need to do all we can to remember her.
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This piece was originally presented at Pink Reads II, organised by Singapore Unbound and Evergreen Review. You can watch a recording of that event here. It has also been published on the Sapho’s Salon website. Many thanks to the organisers of all the events. This is Part I of a two-part series; Part II is forthcoming.
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Image: Wikipedia.