Editorial: Reproductive rights are human rights
Editorial Board
January 23, 2020
Norma McCorvey was born to two Jehovah’s Witnesses in a suburb west of Houston in 1947. She quickly learned that she did not subscribe to the same beliefs as her parents and, as a result, ended up in a correctional facility. After repeatedly seeing her mother drunk with other men, McCorvey promised herself she would pursue a different life. However, by age 22 she had been pregnant three times—the first cared for by McCorvey’s mother and the second by the child’s father. McCorvey, unprepared for the first two pregnancies, was in no way prepared to have a third child, but lacked the means for an abortion or any other alternative.
Few people recognize McCorvey’s name, but nearly all Americans are familiar with her pseudonym, Jane Roe, of Roe v. Wade.