Anti-abortion activists are rejecting the shock claim by the plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade that her conversion to the anti-abortion movement was a fraud.
The claim, made by Norma McCorvey in a “deathbed confession” during the forthcoming FX documentary AKA Jane Roe, discounts her journey from pro-abortion rights activist to born-again Christian and eventually to Catholic anti-abortion advocate as a decadeslong pose. In truth, McCorvey said she was motivated by money. She was not anti-abortion at all, but an opportunist, she told director Nick Sweeney.
“I took their money, and they’d put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say. That’s what I’d say,” she said of her work with anti-abortion groups, including her employer, Operation Rescue. “It was all an act. I did it well, too. I am a good actress.”
McCorvey then went a step further — and endorsed the pro-abortion rights position for which she had originally become famous.
“If a young woman wants to have an abortion, that’s no skin off my ass,” McCorvey said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “That’s why they call it choice.”
The statements jolted the anti-abortion movement, many of whose adherents, although familiar with McCorvey’s rocky history with faith, sexuality, and money, never doubted the sincerity of her convictions on abortion.
And many still don’t doubt her, friends of McCorvey told the Washington Examiner. Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life and one of McCorvey’s confidants, said he does not think her statements in the released clips of the documentary were presented in the proper context.
“That little snippet we saw was nowhere near her deathbed,” Pavone said. “She looked a whole lot better in that clip than she did in the final months and weeks of her life. And sounded a whole lot better, too. If people think this was some kind of deathbed confession, it’s not. These are the words of a woman who felt very uncertain about her future.”
Pavone, a firebrand advocate in anti-abortion politics, said that he was in touch with McCorvey during the time Sweeney was interviewing her. In Pavone’s estimation, she was in a bad place “mentally, emotionally, and financially” because of tensions with her family and friends, as well as the strains of moving into a retirement care facility.
“She wrote me a text on one of the days she was doing the taping for this documentary in which she said, ‘I’m so frustrated with some of these pro-life people, I’m not one of you guys anymore,’” Pavone said. “And we knew what Norma was doing when she said things like that. She was venting.”
McCorvey would often get frustrated with people within the anti-abortion movement but always reconciled after a dispute, according to Pavone. Still, he added, she had a tendency to be “combative” with a “fierce, independent streak.” Her life at the center of a nearly 50-year battle over abortion only intensified those tendencies and made her life more difficult.
“She was so wounded by her involvement in the abortion industry that my friendship and the friendship of others with her was walking with her on a journey of healing, of struggle, of conflict, of falling and rising — yearning for God and growing in the faith,” Pavone said. “We brought her through intensive spiritual and psychological healing. These are not things that you can go through over a 22-year period and fake them, even if you try.”
Pavone said he felt insulted by what he’s seen of the documentary because in his view, it shows “no respect” for the people who knew McCorvey well. And Pavone, who has long been active in political advocacy for anti-abortion causes, can make that claim. In 1998, he became internationally known for bringing McCorvey into the Catholic Church through his spiritual direction. Over the next few decades, he maintained a close relationship with her, as they both spoke at many anti-abortion rallies, including the March for Life, an annual anti-abortion rally held in Washington, D.C.
When it became clear in 2017 that McCorvey was going to die, Pavone was at her side. He celebrated her funeral mass, where he preached about hope and forgiveness. And while he admits that her life is a living testament to “the ambiguity and the conflict” with which many Americans treat abortion, for him, the idea that McCorvey faked her second act is impossible.
“At a certain point in your life, you know that you know someone,” he said. “Otherwise, you have to conclude that no one really knows anybody.”
Cheryl Sullenger, who worked with McCorvey at Operation Rescue — and at one time allowed McCorvey to live in her house in Kansas — agreed with that sentiment. Although she admitted that McCorvey was in no way “perfect,” she said that in spite of all of her struggles, McCorvey had a “good heart.” Sullenger maintained that McCorvey was “100% pro-life” to her death.
But Sullenger still finds the new statements disturbing, particularly the one about being paid off by the anti-abortion movement. To her knowledge, Operation Rescue never paid McCorvey to say anti-abortion things, except, of course, for her salary, Sullenger said. And the video itself, which depicts a visibly sick McCorvey with an oxygen tank, was “painful” to watch.
Sullenger cannot fathom why McCorvey would seem to endorse the pro-abortion rights movement.
“She had a lot of issues, to be honest,” she said. “I think sometimes she would just blurt things out, just to shock people. She kind of enjoyed doing that.”
Other anti-abortion groups have responded in a similar way, reaffirming that, as far as they can tell, McCorvey never received payment to speak at their rallies. Organizers at the March for Life, which hosted McCorvey three times, said that to their knowledge, no one has ever been paid to speak at the event, which is the largest anti-abortion protest in the country.
Lila Rose, president of the anti-abortion group Live Action, said that FX should release all of the footage of its interviews with McCorvey, in the interests of assessing “the accuracy of the documentary’s portrayal of her statements.” Her words echo those of Pavone, who speculated that the statements possibly could have been manipulated.
Sweeney told the Washington Post that his documentary was not intended to take sides on the abortion issue: He only wanted to present McCorvey as a human being caught in the middle of one of the biggest political fights in American history.
“There’s a temptation to reduce her to something like a trophy or an emblem, but it’s important to know there was someone who was a real person,” he said. “People on all sides wanted her to be the person that suited their aims, and in a lot of ways, she just wanted to be herself.”
That explanation did not convince Abby Johnson, the former Planned Parenthood clinic director turned anti-abortion activist. Johnson said that, like everything related to abortion, AKA Jane Roe is the result of a political calculus. With abortion likely on the ballot in the 2020 presidential election, she said, the anti-abortion movement can’t afford to get “distracted” by whether or not McCorvey was actually on their side.
“Of course, this is coming out now because of course, the abortion lobby needs a distraction right before the election,” she said. “The pro-life movement needs to stay focused.”
For her own part, Johnson isn’t sure that McCorvey was mentally well when she participated in the documentary. Johnson recalled how, only days before McCorvey died, the sick woman called Johnson because she wanted to talk to someone who had a “big number.” This, Johnson explained, was a reference to the number of abortions that she was responsible for as a Planned Parenthood clinic director.
For Johnson, that number is about 22,000 aborted babies. For McCorvey, the number was much higher. As she lay dying, Johnson said, McCorvey wept and told her that she felt responsible for every abortion that had occurred since Roe — more than 50 million terminated pregnancies.
“That’s a burden that none of us can even understand,” Johnson said. “Or the toll that it must take on someone’s mental health for 40 years.”
