Roe vs. Wade Anniversary 2009

On this 36th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, I could lament President Obama's latest decisions on abortion, or long for the days when we had a pro-life President in George W. Bush. Instead, I want to tell some of the story of Norma McCorvey, known to many Americans as "Jane Roe."

I watched the movie Roe vs. Wade in 1989. It was enlightening because it depicted what life was like before the decision. Norma was pregnant, and acquaintances advised her to claim she was raped; apparently, Texas law had a rape-exception in its abortion ban. This is important because many assume that pro-lifers in general want to ban all abortions--no exceptions. Actually, there appears to have been some flexibility prior to Roe vs. Wade.

(UPDATE: Actually, I found that Texas law only had an exception for the life of the mother, but acquaintances adviced Norma to claim she was raped to build a more sympathetic case.)

The movie leaned in a pro-choice direction, but it occasionally tried to present the pro-life side. There was a constitutional scholar who said to Sarah Weddington (Jane Roe's lawyer), "You know, if the founding fathers viewed abortion as a right, they would have included it in the Constitution." Weddington replied that the thought never crossed their minds, since abortion was an accepted practice for hundreds of years.

I don't know. Opposition to abortion has existed for a long time, as one can see in the Hippocratic Oath and the first century Epistle of Barnabas (19:5). Were the founding fathers pro-choice because they didn't explicitly ban abortion, or pro-life because they didn't make abortion a right? Although anti-abortion legislation first emerged in the U.S. in the nineteenth century, common law (which is based on court decisions) was against it prior to that point (see here and here). But, even if the founding fathers were pro-choice, heck, many of them owned slaves too! If we're going to have a living, breathing Constitution, shouldn't we at least consider our present ability to look inside the womb and see a real-life human being? But I'm using liberalism here to justify a conservative position!

In another scene of the movie, the lawyer defending the Texas abortion ban, Henry Wade, was talking to a friend about the life of the fetus. "Do you know that in the sixth week of a woman's pregnancy, the child can suck his thumb? We've got to win this!"

One scene that stays in my mind is Norma giving birth. Her plan was to have the child and give her up for adoption. Right after the baby came out, the doctors took her away so they could give her to an adoption agency. "Can't I at least hold her?," Norva asked. The movie was trying to ridicule the "adoption, not abortion" rhetoric, but what went through my mind was, "Hey, she wanted to kill her child earlier in the movie, and now she wants to hold her?"

So the movie made its plug for Roe vs. Wade, and it wasn't an accident that it came out in 1989. That was the year when the Supreme Court was deciding whether or not to overturn Roe, in Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services. The decision upheld certain abortion restrictions, but it stopped short of overturning Roe. One political cartoon portrayed Rehnquist saying, "We've decided not to abort Roe vs. Wade; rather, we will put it up for adoption."

But the movie was incomplete, for Norma McCorvey's story was not yet finished. The year was 1995. I was watching two shows one night: Michael Moore's TV Nation, and Pat Robertson's 700 Club. On TV Nation, Michael Moore was portraying pro-lifers as hateful fanatics. Moore and his cronies were outside of an Operation Rescue leader's home, and the leader said, "Darn, I was about to shoot you!" We were left with a negative impression of the pro-life movement.

But the 700 Club presented another side. Norma McCorvey had just accepted Jesus Christ as her personal Savior, and she was renouncing her role in legalizing abortion. A big reason she did so was the love that Operation Rescue people had shown to her.

Throughout her life, Norma McCorvey was somewhat of a pawn for both sides. She often felt that Sarah Weddington (her lawyer in Roe) used her but did not really care for her. And I recall the Operation Rescue minister who led her to Christ telling Pat Robertson that Norma was a "baby Christian," and he later showed a picture of him baptizing Norma McCorvey on the cover of his autobiography. (My impression is she was used as a pawn, but Weddington and the Operation Rescue leader probably have different explanations.)

But Norma McCorvey was a maverick in her own right. A few years after her baptism, she left evangelicalism and converted to Roman Catholicism (see here). And, in 2008, she endorsed Republican candidate Ron Paul for President, since he promised to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the case that bears her pseudonym.

There are many touching aspects of her story, but I'll save them for another year. Unfortunately, Roe vs. Wade will probably be with us for a while, unless God gives President Obama the grace to change his views on abortion. In the meantime, here's the wikipedia article on Norma McCorvey.