See Norma: The Woman's Conflicted Life at the Center of Roe v. wade

Norma McCorvey, the Jane Roe in the center of Roe c. Wade, was a flawed complainant.

When she took on Roe as a young single woman in Dallas, she didn't think about the fight for reproductive rights. She was barely doing as a waitress, had twice given birth to children for adoption, and just wanted an abortion. Later she lied about how she got pregnant, saying she was raped. When, more than a decade later, she became outspoken and wished to seriously join the movement she had come to represent, her leaders denied her a meaningful role in their protests and rallies.

"I think they're embarrassed," McCorvey told the Texas Monthly in 1993. "They would like me to go to college, with confidence and little white gloves."

Yet Roe remained at the center of McCorvey's life, bound to her by those same two cross-currents that would frame the abortion debate in the United States - religion and sex.

McCorvey had hundreds of partners, almost all women, she said. She also worked for a time as a prostitute in Dallas. But she had been raised as a Jehovah's Witness and considered sex a sin. The fact that her complaint legalized abortion left her in fear for her soul. That was part of the reason she was born again in 1995, she said — to better join the fight against Roe. a majority of Americans now - felt that abortion should be legal in the first trimester. She shared this in the first interview she ever gave, days after Roe, and she shared it again in her last, speaking to me from a hospital bed at the end of her life. (During my decade of research for "The Family Roe," a book about Roe and his plaintiff, I spent hundreds of hours interviewing McCorvey.)

Her private papers – which I found in her former partner's garage, just before the house was foreclosed – offer a first-hand glimpse of McCorvey as she really was: a woman whose torments and ambivalences at about abortion reflect those that divide the country, and that continues to be relevant in the new post-Roe world.

Here is a sample of the material.Credit... Via Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

McCorvey was 13 in October 1960 when she checked into a motel room with a friend who then accused McCorvey of trying "inappropriate things" with her. Dallas Juvenile Court declared McCorvey a "child delinquent", as evidenced by this document. was sent to a Catholic boarding school, and later, at age 16, to a public boarding school for "delinquent girls". She loved being away from her family and had a string of girlfriends. But her mother, Mary Sandefur, beat her because she was gay, Sandefur said in an interview, and McCorvey came to see sex and her sexuality as sinful and wrongful. Years after getting pregnant for the third time and asking for an abortion, she told people she had been raped, presenting herself not as a sinner but as a victim.

McCorvey was the third consecutive generation in her family to become pregnant out of wedlock, according to documents and interviews with family members. His grandmother soon married, while his mother was forced to leave town, give birth in secret and return her child to his parents.

In January 1972, McCorvey's brother Jimmy visited him in Dallas. The 20-something siblings were poor, and Jimmy wrote down his every expense in h...