|
By Susanne Haugh
LILBURN—At times, it seemed she lived a double life.
Before a packed crowd at St. John Neumann Church, Norma McCorvey
recalled reading in the newspaper, “like everybody else,” the Supreme
Court’s 1973 vote that legalized abortion in the United States. The case
had given McCorvey a new name and job title as Jane Roe, poster child for the
abortion rights movement.
McCorvey, a frank, feisty and now “Catholic lady,” spoke
March 1 on her involvement in the Roe vs. Wade case, on her identity as a
“reluctant icon” for the pro-abortion movement and her eventual
conversion to Christianity. Her raw honesty and boldness brought forth both
laughter and tears from those who listened.
Father James Fennessy, pastor at St. John Neumann, offered a
prayer that asked God’s forgiveness for crimes committed against all human
life, “especially the most innocent among us, the unborn.”
He welcomed those present, in particular, Mary Boyert,
archdiocesan pro-life director, and Jay and Elizabeth Bell, parishioners at St.
John Neumann and members of the Respect Life Committee which arranged for
McCorvey’s visit. Father Fennessy then welcomed McCorvey and thanked her
for “her willingness to so tirelessly ... fight for the unborn.”
Jay Bell then introduced McCorvey, acknowledging how her efforts
“can and have changed a lot of hardened hearts.”
McCorvey recalled events from her upbringing as the daughter of an
alcoholic mother, who was Catholic, and a father who was a Jehovah’s
Witness.
She also recounted her first meeting with two attorneys, Sarah
Weddington and Linda Coffee, at a pizza parlor in Dallas. At the time,
McCorvey, who dropped out of school after the ninth grade, was a street person.
She slept in a park and washed her clothes at a nearby Shell service station.
She used and dealt drugs then, she said, and was pregnant.
“I was told at the meeting (with the attorneys), ‘Norma,
did you know that women are now allowed to smoke in public? Norma, did you know
that women are now allowed to vote? Norma, don’t you think women should
have rights to their own bodies?’” she recalled. “In other
words, I was a street person. I was very naive.”
McCorvey felt the condescending attitude of the attorneys who
“stepped on my toes,” she admitted.
When McCorvey asked the attorneys what effect legalizing abortion
would have, they told her that it would probably put a stop to rape and incest,
she recalled. Eventually, the attorneys presented her with an affidavit that
she signed.
“I had very sporadic contact with them after signing the
affidavit,” she said.
Faced with her own pregnancy, McCorvey visited an illegal abortion
clinic in Texas. “I came to get an abortion, but the place was
filthy.”
She recalled seeing a rope hanging from the center of the room
with a ball of gauze attached to it that was covered in dry blood. The clinic
had been closed the week before so she got on a bus to visit her father.
“I wanted to have a legal abortion,” McCorvey recalled,
but she eventually decided to give up for adoption her third daughter,
“the famous Roe baby.” Her first two daughters were also given up for
adoption.
Besides talking about her involvement with the court case, she
offered snippets from her life since then on her search for “something
spiritual.”
As part of seeking a “new vision” for her life, she
moved to Los Angeles and became part of the “goddess movement,” in
which believers see God as a woman. But the “grooviness” of the
movement wore off and McCorvey began to question its foundation.
“I’ve always been seeking something spiritual in my
life, something with a great foundation, something with a history where I could
open up a book and everything I would read is the truth,” McCorvey said.
McCorvey later returned to Texas and took a job as a receptionist
at an abortion clinic. As she recounted different experiences while working in
various jobs at abortion “mills,” one sensed McCorvey’s
reluctance to accept and support what was happening within their walls.
One time she filled in as a counselor to a group of women seeking
abortions.
“I purposefully went and got the nastiest instruments, some
with dry blood on them, to scare the beegeebers out of them.”
She told them that they would get in a position as if having a Pap
smear and then described the procedure to them showing them which instruments
would “cut at the baby” and then “chop it up into all kinds of
pieces.” She told them about the machine that would be inserted into them
to extract the baby’s remains. At that time, someone would hold their hand
and ask them to “think of a glorious time,” she recalled.
McCorvey wanted to “scare them so badly that they
wouldn’t even consider going to another abortion clinic.” She
refunded all but $100 to cover the cost of the sonogram to four or five of the
women, she said.
She recounted times of excessive drinking and drug use during this
low time in her life. “We’d have a person drive for one ounce of
cocaine on Monday morning; that’s not even a killing day,” she said.
Describing herself as a “big pet person,” she wondered
out loud how sanitary conditions could be more strictly enforced in a
veterinary office than in an abortion clinic.
She recalled, after weekends at one abortion clinic, picking up
rat and mice feces and seeing instruments left unsterilized in procedure rooms.
One day she received a call asking her if she knew whom the new
occupants would be in office space next to the abortion clinic where she worked
in the summer of 1995.
“I said, ‘John Travolta? Tom Cruise?’
‘No,’ said the voice, ‘Try Operation Rescue.’”
And in many ways, the rescue of Norma McCorvey from Jane Roe
began.
McCorvey moved her office to the other side of the building to be
further away from Operation Rescue, a pro-life group known for challenging
abortion clinic operators.
“A lot of strange things began happening,” she said. She
detailed an incident where she and a co-worker heard footsteps running down the
hall.
“It sounded like children running barefoot down the
hallway,” she said. “The only children there were from the previous
weekend of execution and they were in the freezer.”
She recalled going home one night where she sat on her porch for
hours. “I talked to God,” she said. “‘What is it
you’re trying to tell me?’”
Not long after, a “sweet child” named Emily Mackey asked
her if she would go to church with her. After dodging the question many times,
McCorvey finally agreed. On July 22 she attended Hillcrest Church and listened
to the pastor speak on John 3:16: “God loved the world so much that he
gave his only Son, so that anyone who believes in him may not be lost but may
have eternal life.”
That night, with legs of “rubber,” McCorvey
“accepted the Lord Jesus Christ into my life as my personal Lord and
Savior ... It toke the love of a 7-year-old child to lead me into the kingdom
of God.”
McCorvey was criticized immediately following her conversion for
returning one last time to get her paycheck, which some saw as blood money, so
that she could pay her bills.
“I apologized to God for that and asked him to forgive me for
that,” she said.
McCorvey said she loved attending Hillcrest Church. She was
inspired to write a poem entitled “Empty Playgrounds” about the pain
she suffers knowing that she has had a role in the legalization of abortion.
Lines from the poem read: “If you like, Lord, use my body to
make your precious children whole again. I ask you to do this not only for
them, Lord, but also for the love I have for each of them.”
McCorvey’s confirmation in the Catholic faith came in 1997.
Having gone to a Catholic church with her mother as a child, McCorvey recalled
an incident where she had been presented with a rosary that had been blessed by
Pope John Paul II.
“I started saying the rosary and suddenly realized that all
the prayers I had learned as an infant when going to the Catholic
church—the Hail Mary, the Our Father, the Apostle’s
Creed—started flowing from me.”
As a Catholic Christian “still under construction,”
McCorvey has felt the healing power of the sacrament of penance, but her past
pushes her in her ministry, called ‘Roe No More.’
“I know the Lord has forgiven my sins, which are as far as
the East is from the West, but there’s something here that still
hurts,” she said, pointing to her heart.
As to her association with the case legalizing abortion, within
her heart she knows, “I never was the former Jane Roe of Roe vs. Wade ...
All I did was sign an affidavit and I’ll regret that until the day I
die,” she said.
McCorvey received a standing ovation from the crowd after she
concluded her talk. Following a question-and-answer session, she joined others
in Lind Hall to sign copies of her book, “Won by Love.”
Sue Stubbs, a parishioner at the Church of the Transfiguration in
Marietta and a member of a fledgling task force to encourage chastity, called
McCorvey’s presentation “authentic” and “affirming.”
“She really brought reality out,” she said.
The hand of God led McCorvey to speak to the Atlanta community,
Elizabeth Bell said. While she recognizes that there are setbacks within the
pro-life movement, Bell hopes that those seeking to end abortion trust God and
seek the power of prayer.
“I’m not pessimistic ... It’s all in God’s
hands. You never know, maybe there was one kid here tonight who sees things
differently,” she said. |
