TWO SUPREME COURT RULINGS
Roe vs. Wade: A Tale of Four Women
Roe vs. Wade started with a young pregnant woman claiming falsely she had been raped. This is the story of Norma Lee, two female lawyers and the daughter, Shelly Lynn, who Norma Lee wanted to abort.
Norma Lee grew up in a corner of Louisiana in a town so small it wasn’t registered as a town. The town’s population today is just over 200. What it was in 1947 when she was born is anybody’s guess.
Norma Lee was wild. At the age of 10 she robbed a gas station, taking money out of the till. She and a friend spent the money on a hotel room in Oklahoma City, where after two days alone, a hotel maid walked in on them kissing.
She was sent to reform school in Texas. Far from hating it, she liked the State School for Girls so much, every time she was released, she’d commit a crime to be sent back in.
Her father, a television repairman, abandoned the family when she was 13. She was raised by her mother, an alcoholic and mean drunk.
Once when out on release she was raped by a cousin.
Norma Lee married at 16, left her husband after he beat her, went to her mother for support and gave birth to her first child. Likely from her mother’s influence she picked up an alcohol and drug habit. Norma Lee said later her mother had her sign what she called insurance papers. They were adoption papers, and she lost her baby.
She became pregnant again the following year. She gave that baby up for adoption.
When she became pregnant a third time, at the age of 21, she sought an abortion by falsely claiming she had been raped by a group of black men. That claim, she thought, would allow her a loophole in Texas law allowing her to have an abortion. Her false rape claim didn’t hold. She admitted later her claim was false.
Her doctor advised her to talk to a lawyer specialising in adoptions. That lawyer referred her to two female lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee. They were looking for a woman having difficulty seeking an abortion to challenge Texas law prohibiting abortions, with some exceptions.
Norma Lee agreed. The two lawyers filed their lawsuit against the Texas district attorney, Henry Wade. At the same time the two female lawyers decided to protect their client’s name, by giving her a pseudonym, Jane Roe.
The lawsuit filed was Roe vs. Wade.
It took three years for Roe vs. Wade to work its way through lower courts to the Supreme Court of the United States. Norma Lee’s desire for an abortion was never realized. She gave birth on June 2, 1970. The baby was put up for adoption three days after she was born.
On January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court found in favour of Roe in the Roe vs. Wade case, deciding the Texas restrictions to abortion were unconstitutional. In the wording of the Court:
“A state criminal abortion statute of the current Texas type, that excepts from criminality only a life-saving procedure on behalf of the mother, without regard to pregnancy stage and without recognition of the other interests involved, is violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Sixteen years after the Supreme Court decision, Norma Lee McCorvey, the Roe in Roe vs. Wade, contacted her child she gave up for adoption in 1970. During one call Norma Lee asked her daughter, Shelley Lynn Thorton, why she didn’t thank her for not aborting her.
Thorton’s reaction was harsh: “What! I’m supposed to thank you for getting knocked up … and then giving me away?”
Thorton said later, “When someone’s pregnant with a baby, and they don’t want that baby, that person develops knowing they’re not wanted.”
When Roe vs. Wade was struck down by a much changed United States Supreme Court in June, 2022, Shelly Lynn Thorton gave her opinion on the landmark legal decision.
“I believe that the decision to have an abortion is a private, medical choice that should be between a woman, her family, and her doctor,” Thorton said. “We have lived in times of uncertainty and insecurity before, but to have such a fundamental right taken away and this ruling be overturned concerns me of what lies ahead.”
