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Roe finds god, prays for life

Insight on the News, Feb 19, 1996 by Julia Duin, Ralph Z. Hallow

The plaintiff in Roe vs. Wade, the case that legalized abortion in the United States, has become an active Christian and pro-life activist.

When pro-choice icon Norma McCorvey announced her conversion to Christianity in August, someone rented a billboard in north Dallas proclaiming, "Welcome to the Lord Jesus Christ, Norma!" But McCorvey, who is better known as "Jane Roe" as in Roe vs. Wade, sent conflicting signals, saying she still favored first-trimester abortions and was maintaining a lesbian relationship with her housemate, Connie Gonzales.

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That all has changed, McCorvey says in her first interview since the media storm after her baptism in a Dallas swimming pool. "I am not a lesbian. I'm just a child in Christ now," she says. McCorvey, 48, adds that her relationship with Gonzales, 64, has been platonic for the last three years. "We decided we'd rather be friends than lovers. You know, honey, after you pass 40, you don't feel a lot of anything."

Abortion-rights activists discount McCorvey's public flip-flop. "Most of the pro-choice community does not think that her change of heart has affected the issue or movement at all," says Vicki Saporta, executive director of the National Abortion Federation. Nevertheless, abortion-rights activists reacted with shock when McCorvey was baptized. She had converted to Christianity a few weeks before, on July 22, when she walked forward to make a public profession of faith in Christ at Hillcrest Bible Church in north Dallas. She has begun studying the Bible, attending church twice a week and taking a beginners' class there.

She prays, sometimes from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. "How is it I can serve you?" she says she asks God. "How can I please you and make you smile on me? I guess he's still thinking about it. `Okay, McCorvey,' he's saying, `what are we going to do with you?' He's known everything I've lived, I've done, is training. It's all led up to this point. He is king. I can serve him in any capacity."

McCorvey made history as a litigant in the 1973 case that legalized abortion. More than two decades later, he says she regrets her role in the Supreme Court's landmark decision. But the plainspoken McCorvey has been more of a bane than a boon to the pro-life movement, with her history as shoplifter, alcoholic, drug dealer and dabbler in black magic. The Rev. Philip "Flip" Benham, leader of the abortion group Operation Rescue, describes her as a "blue-collar lady from the wrong side of the tracks." Something drew her to Benham, whose national headquarters shares a building with Choice for Women, an antiabortion clinic. McCorvey was work as marketing director at the latter hen Operation Rescue moved in last April and started buttonholing women in the parking lot who were coming for abortions.

"I was taking the calls and making appointments for people to execute their children," she says. "We told them not to listen to the people next door; we told them they'd kill you." Now she's out in that parking lot trying to dissuade women from having the procedure. Most of them don't listen to her, she says, but six workers at the clinic have quit since Operation Rescue arrived. Benham says three have come born-again Christians. "When people see Norma and realize Jesus as forgiven her, they say, `Maybe there's hope for me,"' says Benham. "The abortion industry is crumbling under the weight of its own sin and don't have enough fingers to keep their crumbling dike."

McCorvey says she now opposes abortion on any terms, even in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother.

Roe finds god, prays for life

Insight on the News, Feb 19, 1996 by Julia Duin, Ralph Z. Hallow

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