The Daily - The Story of Roe v. Wade, Part 1: Who Was Jane Roe? (From the Archive)

Episode Date: May 7, 2022

This week, the release of a draft Supreme Court opinion striking down Roe v. Wade has put a spotlight on the 50-year-old case that redefined abortion in America.Today, we revisit a two-part series that first ran in 2018 about the history of the case and the woman behind it.In Part 1, the story of Jane Roe.Guest: Sabrina Tavernise, co-host of The Daily. As a correspondent in 2018, she reported on the story of Roe v. Wade.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading:The leaked draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade also takes aim at its version of history, challenging decades of scholarship that argues abortion was not always a crime.Remembering a time before Roe: When New York legalized abortion in 1970, three years before the landmark ruling, hundreds of thousands of women traveled there from other states for the procedure.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. This week, the release of a draft Supreme Court opinion striking down Roe v. Wade has put a spotlight on the 50-year-old case that redefined abortion in America. Today, we revisit a two-part series that first ran in 2018 about the history of that case and the woman behind it. In part one, Sabrina Tabernisi tells the story of Jane Roe. It's Saturday, May 7th. of Jane Roe. It's Saturday, May 7th. Do you want to see the court overturn Roe v. Wade? Well, if we put another two or perhaps three justices on,

that's really what's going to be, that will happen. And that'll happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life injustices on the court. You don't understand, so don't say that you do. I understand the facts. I understand where your points are. You don't understand that making abortion illegal and inaccessible will hurt more women than just having equal access for everyone. What about the children that are hurt?

They're not children, they're fetuses. My body, my choice! Take a look at that picture? My body, my choice. They're not children, they're fetuses. My body, my choice. Take a look at that picture. It's got hands. My body, my choice. It's got feet. It's got a head. My body, my choice. It's heartbeat in 16 days.

Go up. Go up. Go up. Go up. Go up. Go up. Go up. Go up.

Go up. Go up. Go up. Go up. Go up. Go up. Go up. Go months. That is not your choice. If you don't want to experience something, you shouldn't have to experience it. You should be able to choose.

I understand. You do not understand. You don't. You cannot have a baby, so you do not understand. It's not loving. I'm not taking away a woman's right. That's not taking away a woman's right. I'm giving a child a chance to live. No, you're taking away a woman's life. So Roe v. Wade is probably one of the most recognizable Supreme Court cases in American history.

It came up through the courts in the early 1970s and was decided in 1973. The woman at the heart of the case, she remained anonymous. They gave her name, Jane Roe, who most people don't know very much about. In fact, I didn't know very much about before I started looking into it. And in a lot of ways, her story and the arc of her life really tells the story of how we got to where we are today. How we got to this point where abortion is probably the most divisive issue of our time. most divisive issue of our time. So Jane Roe is a woman named Norma McCorvey.

She was born Norma Nelson. She was born in September 1947 in a rural, small Louisiana town. She's born to a mother who, by her account, tried to get an abortion when she learned she was pregnant with Norma. The family was poor. Her mother was a violent alcoholic and was physically abusive to her. Her father was a TV repairman, sort of a gentle man by her account, but ended up leaving the family by the time she was 13. So at some point when Norma was pretty young,

the family moved to Texas. And Texas is where she ends up spending most of her adolescence, her childhood. She was kind of this skinny kid, small, and moved really fast. Her friends called her Pixie. And she had terrible, terrible fights with her mother and would often try to run away from home. She actually had gotten in trouble with the law when she was just 10.

She said she stole some money from a Texaco gas station where she'd been washing windshields for some money and took a bus to Oklahoma with her friend and cops found them and brought them back. friend and cops found them and brought them back. And after that, she's sent to first a Catholic boarding school where she doesn't do very well and writes that she was actually sexually abused there. And then to a girl's state reform school. She never made it past the ninth grade. And when she gets out, she's sent to live with a friend of the family, a man who's a watch repairman, not her mom. She stays with him for three and a half weeks. And by her account, he rapes her almost every night through that period. So this is a childhood of almost unrelenting woe.

She is doing everything she can to survive and not have what she describes as this rage building inside her against the world just explode all the time. So when she's 15, she has a job working as a roller skating waitress in kind of a burger joint in Dallas. And one night she's working, and a guy drives up in this really, really nice Ford. And he rolls down the window, and he says something lewd to her, actually.

She kind of gives it right back to him. And that becomes her husband. His name is Woody McCorvey. He's a metal worker. They have this very short courtship, and they move in together, and she realizes that he is also physically abusive. Once she becomes pregnant, he becomes enraged and beats her up very badly.

The police come, windows are broken, plates are smashed, she's lost consciousness, and she flees back to her mother's house. Fifteen years old. Yeah, she just turned 16. She's a child. She has the baby Melissa, and her mother's the one who cares for that baby. So Norma goes to work in bars as a bartender. She's drinking a lot at this point, and she gets pregnant two more times. Her second pregnancy, she gives the baby up for adoption and when she gets pregnant the third time she's working as a carnival barker in a traveling carnival in Louisiana and Mississippi they've come to a stop for the winter actually in

Florida and she realizes that she's pregnant. She feels the familiar queasiness and tiredness. At this point, she really, really doesn't want to go through the pregnancy and having the baby and giving the baby up for adoption again. She wanted to save herself that emotional and physical anguish. And she gathers all the money that she has in her pockets, buys a bus ticket, and ends up back in Dallas again. So she's pretty desperate and she's looking for any solution. I mean, she wants to get rid of this pregnancy. So she's talking to someone in the bar, a woman named Jinx, who's a friend.

And Jinx tells her there's something called abortion. It's this medical procedure that doctors use to end a pregnancy. called abortion. It's this medical procedure that doctors use to end a pregnancy. What you need to understand about this period is that it's really, really different from the one we live in today. Abortion is not the culture war's issue yet. It hadn't become this lightning rod that it would become later. It wasn't yet the defining issue around which our modern American political landscape kind of took shape. So back in the 1960s, most polls had Americans thinking that some form of abortion probably should be legal. It was seen as a kind of women's health initiative, and it was seen as a kind of effort at reform. I mean, these were laws

that were seen by a lot of upper middle class and middle class people as sort of inhumane, you know, women dying from botched illegal abortions. And also kind of outdated, the sort of a relic of the past. These were Victorian era laws still governing policy in modern America. The laws on abortion vary from state to state. Three states, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii, have abortion laws somewhat similar to New York's. So because of all of that, what was happening around the country was that there were these bills in state legislatures aimed at decriminalizing abortion. Thirteen states have laws permitting legal abortion in certain circumstances. They called them liberalization bills, where instead of no access at all,

these bills would allow some, and in some cases, a lot. For example, in New York State. The New York State Senate today passed one of the nation's most sweeping abortion control bills. The really surprising twist is that a Republican governor signed it into law. And this was not unusual, because the places where these laws are being talked about, the places where they actually pass, tend to be run by Republicans. Hmm. In California, actor Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Reagan

arrived to cast their votes in the state's primary election. He's the Republican nominee for governor. It's his first political contest. I mean, most surprisingly, so I was going through and doing this research, and I read about California and saw that the person who signed the California bill into law in 1967 was Ronald Reagan. Colorado's bill passed in 1967.

North Carolina's in 1967. Georgia in 1968. Maryland in 1968. Kansas in 1969. Arkansas in 1969. New Mexico in 1969. Virginia in 1970. And South Carolina in 1970.

Wow, so these politics are kind of unrecognizable to us now. This was actually very surprising to me. I didn't understand this history before I started. And I almost felt like I was blindfolded. Like I couldn't tell who would make what decision. It was like, like I had this key to understanding politics today, the way I understand left and right and Democrat and Republican, and none of that worked.

It was an entirely different map. The only part of the country that failed in passing these bills was the Northeast — Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island. And the reason for that is that the biggest and fiercest opposition to abortion was from the Catholic Church and Catholic activists. And Catholics, for the most part, were Democrats. So those states that are still solidly Catholic and Democratic. That's exactly right. But one state that had yet to do any of this, that hadn't liberalized yet, was Texas. And Texas was the state that Norma was living in when she got pregnant for a third time

and went to her friend Jinx at the bar to ask for advice in how to deal with it. in how to deal with it. Didn't want to have it. Didn't want it in my body. I wanted to have an abortion. So Norma finds out that there's this thing called abortion, and she goes to her doctor, very kindly elderly man, who actually delivered her first two children. And she said she's heard about abortion and she wants to have

one. And he looks at her with kind of patient eyes and says, I'm sorry, Norma, you can't get an abortion in the state of Texas. It's illegal. And she's really upset by this. And she says, isn't there some way? I mean, won't somebody do it here? I can give you money. And he says, you know, it's not about money. I'm supposed to report a doctor who does it. It's illegal, Norma. And so at some point in the visit, he writes down a name on a piece of paper. And she gets kind of excited because she thinks, oh, maybe this is actually the name of someone who will do an abortion for me that he just doesn't want to say out loud. And when she calls it later, she realizes it's the name and number of an adoption lawyer. So he's trying to dissuade her.

He's trying to dissuade her. She decides she's just going to take the matter into her own hands. And she gets a recommendation from a friend about an illegal abortion provider. And she thinks she's going to do it. So she saves up some money. I had $250 of my rent money saved up. And she goes to the address that the person gave her. And she knocks on a door

and she goes in. And the account in her book is that she sees blood on the floor and police tape and no one's there. There was nobody there. that she sees blood on the floor and police tape and no one's there. There was nobody there. And she sees someone kind of nearby this building and asks what happened. And he said, oh, the cops raided this place a couple of weeks ago. And she's terrified and she thinks she just can't go through with something like that. So she calls the adoption lawyer in desperation.

And the lawyer, as it turns out, is friends with someone named Linda Coffey. He said that he just knew of these two young law students who had just graduated college. Linda Coffey. And she, together with another young woman lawyer. Sarah Weddington. Sarah Weddington. Are looking for a case that would challenge the abortion laws for the whole country to bring to the Supreme Court.

I mean, it just went right over my head. I mean, I didn't have a clue to what he was saying. And would I like to meet these two women? Sure. These two young women lawyers are feminists. Linda Coffey is clerked for a very famous feminist judge. And Sarah Weddington has been seared by her own experience of having to go to Mexico to get an abortion when she got pregnant in law school. And they're really at this point not that much older than Norma, who's in her very early 20s. much older than Norma, who's in her very early 20s. And when she first meets Sarah and Linda at a pizza restaurant in Dallas called Columbo's, she says it has checkered tablecloths.

She's already a few months pregnant. We sat and talked and drank beer for the longest time. We got kind of smashed. Then we had pizza. Then we drank some more beer. And they started pounding, you know, all this, well, don't you think women should have the right to control their own body? Yeah. So what was it about Norma that attracted these lawyers to her? What made her,

in their mind, the perfect plaintiff for this case? So in a narrow legal sense, Norma actually really worked. She was a young woman who desperately wanted an abortion and had asked her doctor for one, but it just so happened that she lived in a state

that did not allow it legally. So in that sense, she fit the bill. But in so many other senses, in a very broad way, she didn't. She was very imperfect. And she was kind of a loose cannon and kind of rough. All I was was just a simple little girl from Louisiana who thought she knew what she wanted. She was a very flawed spokeswoman for this movement. They wanted to change a law. I wanted to have an abortion. They said, Norma, don't you want to exercise your rights by having control over your own body?

Yes, I said. Well, all you have to do is sign here on this dotted line. We'll hear arguments in number 18, a roll against Wade. But despite all of that, the two lawyers brought the case, Weddington and Coffey. Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court, we are once again before this court to ask relief against the continued enforcement of the Texas abortion statute. The first plaintiff was Jane Roe, an unmarried pregnant girl who had sought an abortion in the state of Texas and was denied it because of the Texas abortion statute, which provides an abortion is lawful only for the purpose of saving the life of the woman.

The women of Texas still must either travel to other states, if they are that sophisticated and can afford it, or they must resort to some other very undesirable alternatives. And yet we can certainly show that it is a continuing problem to Texas women. There still are unwanted pregnancies. There are still women who, for various reasons, do not wish to continue the pregnancy, whether because of personal health considerations, whether because of their family situation,

whether because of financial situations, education, working situations, some of the many things we discussed at the last hearing. And they won. And they changed the lives of millions of women. Good evening. In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court today legalized abortions. So the court rules 7-2 in favor of Roe. Hmm. That's an overwhelming majority that's almost inconceivable at this moment.

Yeah, exactly. But at the time, it was seen as really kind of uncontroversial. It's nothing like the firestorms that were created after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which desegregated schools, or the 1962 decision banning prayer in schools. Nothing like that. It just kind of passed. The majority in cases from Texas and Georgia said that the decision to end a pregnancy during the first three months belongs to the woman and her doctor, not the government. Justice Harry Blackmun writes the majority opinion for the court. He's a Nixon appointee, and he used to work for the Mayo Clinic representing doctors. He was their

general counsel. He's from Minnesota. He's really coming from the perspective of doctors. You know, it's a doctor's prerogative to make decisions that are best for his patient, and the state really shouldn't get in the way of that. This essentially a right to privacy and this right to privacy he says is a constitutional right there's a lot of scholarship about that that comes later but at the time this is what he decides this is what the court decides it's unquestioned Romaine out of created a social firestorm, but policy-wise, it was a really big change. Now suddenly 46 states had to revise their laws based on this federal ruling, and that was a big policy change. So it became suddenly a national issue.

Sugar and spice and everything nice. That's what little girls are made of. And it became a national issue in the way that it had never been before. Before it had been a matter of what any given state was going to decide. You know, there has to be a meaning. Every boy in this society is raised to be something,

to be a doctor, to be a lawyer, to be something. Every girl is raised to be a housewife and a mother. She is not raised to be something other than that. And it became a national issue exactly at the time that the feminist movement and feminism were asking for their own rights. Is this the true role? Do I have to get married? Do I have to get pregnant? Do I have a choice? Women in America were pushing the Equal Rights Amendment,

were marching and saying our bodies are selves. We learned that we have the power to change, to change the conditions that oppress us. They've said what we're saying, that we have the power to change, to change the conditions that oppress us. They've said what we're saying, that women have a fundamental right to control their own bodies and to control their own lives. And so abortion, that started to become fused in the public's mind with feminism. Hard luck is the fortune of all womankind. And it begins to become this lightning rod, one that would change

the nature and the fate of this issue entirely. We are not here to advocate abortion. We do not ask this court to rule that abortion is good or desirable in any particular situation. We are here to advocate that the decision as to whether or not a particular woman will continue to carry or will terminate a pregnancy is a decision that should be made by that individual. That in fact she has a constitutional right to make that decision for herself and that the state has shown no interest in interfering with that decision. Our supplemental brief on page 14 points out that the brief of the opposition

can't quite decide when life does begin. In part two, the culture wars and Norma McCorvey's complicated role in them. This episode was produced by Lindsay Garrison and edited by Lisa Tobin and Paige Cowett. It was engineered by Chris Wood and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.