SOMETIMES she just couldn’t settle at anything. At ten she ran away from home to stay with a girlfriend in a motel. At 16 she married a man who took her for a ride in his black Ford car, but she left after two months because he beat her. She lived on the streets, slept with women and men, got pregnant by the men. Pot, acid, mescalin, she did it all. Work was whatever came along: barhop, carnival barker, house-painter, cleaner. She got involved in the whole abortion debate first on one side and then, when she took Jesus Christ for her personal saviour, on the other. That made her famous, though nobody knew who the regular Norma McCorvey was. And maybe they didn’t care.

What her mind had been crystal-clear about though, in the last months of 1969, was that she had to get rid of her latest pregnancy. She was 22, and this was her third. The first baby, her daughter Melissa, had been taken away by her mother who said she was a filthy whore and not fit to raise her, and the second baby had been adopted by its father. Now there was another one growing in her body. The state of Texas, where she lived, banned abortions unless the woman’s life was in danger. She couldn’t say it was. And because she was poor, she couldn’t go to Mexico (as one of her lawyers did, and never told her), or rely on some private doctor to help. When she saved up her rent money to visit the one illegal clinic she knew in Dallas, she found it had been busted the week before. Through the window she could see the dirty instruments and dried blood on the floor, roaches and creeping things. All she wanted was a clean white bed to lay down on in a safe place. She didn’t have that privilege.

So when she was put in touch with two lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, who wanted to change the law, she was thrilled. They met over beers and pizza, and drank to women taking proper control over their own bodies. At some point she signed an affidavit which she hoped would persuade some nice judge to give Miss Norma McCorvey, aka Miss Jane Roe, permission for an abortion right away, because she was already five months gone. But nobody was bothered about that. It turned out that she made a good plaintiff only if she was pregnant and desperate, as they could see she was with her swollen eyes and the cuts on her wrists, and the case dragged on so long that her baby was two and a half before the Supreme Court decided in January 1973 that abortion was a constitutional right for all American women. The baby had gone for adoption again, and she felt miserable, even though she hadn’t wanted it.

In her sadness she ignored how Roe v Wade was going. She didn’t testify, never went to court, and read about the decision in the newspaper like everyone else. But suddenly Jane Roe was everywhere, this unknown woman (or pawn, she felt) who had won freedom for millions of American women, or consigned millions of little American boys and girls to slaughter, depending on your view. And that was her.

She told very few people. Mostly she hid away with her cats and plants and her lover Connie Gonzales, which was difficult also, as lesbians weren’t exactly welcome in Texas. In the 1980s she took work in the newly legal abortion clinics in Dallas with their safe, clean white beds, and slowly came out to the world. That made her plenty of enemies, who called her a baby-killer and rammed their trolleys into her heels in the Tom Thumb store. But it didn’t make her the friends she expected. She was too simple for the pro-choice people, who seemed to shun her at their rallies and sent a strong hint that she was totally stupid, though she had brains and ideas. She wasn’t their special chosen Jane Roe, and they didn’t want Norma McCorvey.

This unsettled things in her mind again. The Operation Rescue folks moved in right next door to the clinic, with their posters of bloody fetuses which really freaked her out, and on her smoking breaks she would see them praying for her. She began to hear infant laughter in the clinic, and when the women told her why they had come she would find herself thinking, that’s not a reason. In 1995 she went to church one day and turned to Jesus right away. The ceiling didn’t fall down, and lightning didn’t strike when she got baptised in someone’s swimming pool; just the best high of her life. Jesus forgave her for all those dead babies, and now she would help save them.

Still a street kid

For the pro-life cause she got herself arrested, campaigned against Barack Obama, testified in Congress and tried to disrupt the appointment of a pro-choice justice. But she didn’t fit neatly with these people, either. Norma McCorvey was a street kid, rough at the edges and still wild inside. She still told tales. If she was going to be a trophy celebrity for the anti-abortion cause, as they wanted, she would have to be an ideologue and clean-cut like them. Even the Rev Flip Benham, who baptised her, called her a money-fisher because she charged top dollar for interviews. So what did he want her to live on? Didn’t she already buy her clothes at the bargain store?

She had never been right for Jane Roe. But she wasn’t wrong, either. Some poor woman would have to have represented all the rest. And Norma McCorvey was as conflicted about abortion as almost the whole of America was.