Marlene Wagman-Geller

   Ironically, although the Thirteen Colonies were christened the United States, certain seismic tremors proved divisive. In the nineteenth century, the Gray was pitted against the Blue; in the twentieth century, there was no love lost between the hawks and the doves; in the twenty-first century, pussy-hats faced off against the Trumpites. Another tear in the fabric of the Union launched a movement whose tremors still reverberate.

     Norma Leah Nelson was born on the very wrong side of the Simmesport, Louisiana track. Like Annie, she was destined to a hard-knock life but unlike the fictional redhead, Daddy Warbucks never came to the rescue. Norma’s grandmother was a prostitute and a fortuneteller, but it is unlikely she foresaw her granddaughter would become a role model in the women’s movement. Her mother, Mildred, was an abusive alcoholic who moved with her two children to Texas after her marriage to Olin ended when Norma was 13.  Part Cajun, part Cherokee Indian, and raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, Norma was 10 when she stole money from a gas station to run away from home. She ended up in state institutions, ones she described as the highlight of her childhood. Her education came from reform schools until she dropped out in the ninth grade. By age 15, a nun and a male relative had sexually assaulted her. 

       At 16, in another attempt to escape, she married an itinerant steel worker, Woody McCorvey, who she had known for six weeks. The new Mrs. McCorvey became pregnant; thrilled, Norma spent $11.00 on a Chef Boyardee dinner, some hamburger meat, and a red-and-white plastic tablecloth. She recalled, “I’m fixing this big spaghetti dinner, had a candle on the table, trying to make it real romantic so I could let him know I was going to have a baby.” As neither of Woody’s previous wives had been pregnant, he wrongly assumed he was infertile-and his child-bride had been unfaithful. His response, “You’re a bitch. You’ve been sleeping with someone else.’ ‘And then he hit me, from the kitchenette clear into the living room.’” Norma returned home to raise her unborn child. However, in the vein of the best-laid plans after Melissa’s birth, Norma confided in her mother her sexual preference was for women, and Mildred kicked her out. McCorvey said that when she was drunk, Mildred tricked her into signing adoption papers. She explained she did not want the child raised by a lesbian. Norma acknowledged that while her mother was raising Melissa, she was raising hell.

      What followed was years of alcohol and drug abuse and jobs that ranged from bartender to carnival barker. Looking for love any place she could find it, Norma had affairs with both men and women. After a relationship with a co-worker- she would only identify as Joe- resulted in a second pregnancy at age 19, she relinquished parental rights to the father. In 1969 she had conceived yet again with Carl, a man she had dated for a few months. She said, “I never considered myself a lesbian then. My mother put it into my head I was bisexual. I only ever slept with four or five men, but I got pregnant with three of them.” Not wanting to undergo a third unwanted birth, she turned to an illicit abortion mill only to discover it had been shut down.

      Without money to travel to a state where abortion was legal, Norma contacted attorneys Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, two lawyers looking for a woman to serve as a plaintiff. At Columbo, a Dallas pizza parlor, the three women met to discuss plans to change the law of the land. Norma signed an affidavit that she did not read and later said her lawyers did not share the fact that any ruling would come too late to help her. According to Norma, they were less interested in the predicament of one plaintiff than in the rights of millions.  In her wildest dreams, Norma never imagined her situation would become a cause célèbre.

      In the landmark legal ruling Roe v Wade, the justices ruled women had the right to the control of their own bodies “free of interference by the State.” Jane Roe served as McCorvey’s pseudonym to protect her privacy; Wade was Dallas County district attorney, renowned as the DA in charge of the case against Jack Ruby. The watershed ruling proved a knife in the heart of American unity. The Pro-Choice group viewed it as a victory for women’s rights while the Pro-Choice group felt it the handiwork of the devil. In the ensuing years, images have become embedded on the public- both of posters displaying mangled fetuses, of a woman standing outside the White House with a message to her current president: Bush keep out of mine.

    Lost in the tug-of-war was the woman at the eye of the storm who put her baby up for adoption. She moved in with her lover, immigrant Connie Gonzalez, and the two worked as cleaning ladies. They met when Ms. Gonzalez caught Ms. McCorvey shoplifting groceries from a store where she worked. (She let her keep them).  Only after a few years, Norma revealed to her girlfriend she was Jane Roe. The incredulous Connie responded, “Yeah, and I’m the pope.” McCorvey-who had come out of the closet with her sexual orientation - also decided to come out to the fact she was behind the historic ruling. The revelation occurred in 1980 when she became infuriated by a newspaper article that claimed Jane Roe was not only a fictitious name but also a nonexistent person.  Norma took her story to a Dallas TV reporter. The fallout from her confession was she became the target of egg-throwing vandals and the object of an avalanche of hate mail. The outing ignited a return to the controversial case, and reporters tracked down Mildred to her Dallas trailer park. The antipathy between mother and daughter was readily apparent and the older one groused, “She drank and she took dope and she slept with women. She was a die-hard whore.” This remark was followed by an obscenity, a solitary tooth rooted in her upper gum. “She was wild. Wild. I beat the fuck out of her.” The news piqued the interest of NBC, and they consulted with McCorvey for their film Roe vs. Wade, based on Norma’s hard-knock life that led to the historic ruling. As she and Connie watched the movie -Holly Hunter starred as the accidental activist - McCorvey’s comments peppered the script, “That’s my necklace! That’s my headband!” However, her mood turned sober as she watched the actress enter a pay phone to call her mother with the news she was pregnant. The response from the other end, “You ever use the word ‘no’?” Even more chilling was when anti-choice protestors fired bullets at their house in a pre-dawn attack; Connie covered her lover with her own body. The snipers also shot at her blue car, dubbed the Roe-mobile. Terrified, she and Connie lived on the move, couch surfing at friends’ homes while they searched for an anonymous address. When they finally found a home, Norma hung a dreamcatcher, an Indian hoop with feathers and ribbons, over her bed and said, “If you have bad dreams, they will be filtered out through the universe to go someplace else.” If only. In spite of the trauma that would have flat-lined another, the diminutive McCorvey-known as Pixie, never admitted defeat. According to Norma, “My life has never been ideal. But I’ve always been a scrapper. Whether I was right or wrong, I was always right in my mind.”

       After emerging from her cocoon, the woman never destined to encounter the Warhol 15 minutes of fame, appeared at women’s rallies in front of a crowd of 300,000 in Washington, sat on a speaker’s platform with Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Glenn Close. McCorvey stated, “This issue is the only thing I live for. I live, eat, breathe, think everything about abortion.”  The spirit of the pro-choice followers was the slogan, “It’s time for the rosaries to get off our ovaries.” 

   Ms. McCorvey’s life took another sharp turn in 1995.  While she was working in a Dallas women’s clinic, A Choice for Women, the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue relocated next door. It seemed a deliberate provocation, although the Reverend Phillip Benham, an Evangelist Minister, attributed it to the hand of God. Its staff adorned its walls with dozens of white crosses tied with pink and blue ribbons, and Benham declared, “At the killing center, at the gates of hell, this is where the church of Jesus Christ needs to be.” Their posters of bloody fetuses freaked Norma out as did the fact that on her smoking breaks, she saw them praying for her soul. Soon Benham and Norma began meeting across protest lines. She attended his church, and within months, McCorvey had accepted Jesus as her Savior. The Reverend baptized her in a swimming pool, making her a born-again Christian. Pro-life activists were jubilant and commented, “The poster child has jumped off the poster.”  She felt Jesus forgave her for all those dead babies, and now, in a drastic turnabout, she determined to dedicate her life to save them. In 1999, in a nod to irony, Roe testified before the Senate, “I am dedicated to spending the rest of my life undoing the law that bears my name.” The famous attorney Gloria Allred -who had gone with her to pro-choice rallies, said of Norma’s switch, “It was a career move.” The police arrested her when she protested against the appointment of the pro-choice Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. She also made TV ads against Obama saying, “He murders babies.” She later converted to Roman Catholicism that entailed renouncing her lesbianism, and she broke up with the semper fidelis Connie. Given the details of McCorvey’s life, the letter ‘l’ could never be put after her given name of Norma-as in normal.

       The restless woman at last found rest when she passed away in 2017 from heart failure. Piper packed quite a punch jousting at windmills, but her greatest battle was Roe v. Roe.