Anonymous Roe v. Wade plaintiff says she was paid to change her mind on abortion

(Image credit: GREG GIBSON/AFP via Getty Images)

published 19 May 2020

Norma McCorvey, the once-anonymous plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, famously renounced abortion rights her after the case expanded them across the country. Except she didn't.

Just a few months before McCorvey died in 2017, she made a "deathbed confession" to interviewers for the forthcoming FX documentary AKA Jane Roe. "It was all an act," McCorvey said of her public anti-abortion stance following the Roe case, the Los Angeles Times reports ahead of the documentary's Friday premiere.

Years after Roe overturned abortion bans nationwide, McCorvey came out against abortion and spent the rest of her life trying to get the decision overturned. But as she says in the documentary, she only did so because anti-abortion groups such as Operation Rescue were paying her to do so. "I took their money and they'd put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say," McCorvey said. "It was all an act. I did it well, too. I am a good actress." McCorvey then revealed those anti-abortion groups never seemed to change her mind. "If a young woman wants to have an abortion, that's no skin off my ass. That's why they call it choice," McCorvey said.

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Rob Schenck, an evangelical minister and former leader of Operation Rescue, is among those who worked with McCorvey, and has also since distanced himself from the anti-abortion movement. He often wondered if McCorvey was "playing us," though he "knew damn well we were playing her." "What we did with Norma was highly unethical. The jig is up," he said in the documentary. Read more at the Los Angeles Times.

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Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.