http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jul/07/norma-mccorvey-abortion-americaSuch is the volatile, confusing and contradictory world of Norma McCorvey. She is, or was, the Jane Roe of the US supreme court's most famous and contentious ruling, Roe v Wade. In 1973, as the anonymous pregnant plaintiff, her plight was presented to the court so that American women could win the constitutional right to an abortion. For the past 36 years, Roe versus Wade has been a fault line across America, pitting its coasts against its heartland, state against state, woman against woman. And with the killing of the abortion doctor, George Tiller, in Kansas in May, the issue has come hurtling back into the national consciousness, its potential for vicious conflict thrown into stark relief.
For 36 years, Roe v Wade has also been the great divider for McCorvey personally. Abortion has come to dominate her life, carving it into two blocks that are so wildly at odds with each other that it is hard to imagine them being squeezed into the same human frame.
Here's what McCorvey wrote in 1994, when she was proud to be Jane Roe, a supporter of the women's rights she helped to attain: "All over the country the anti-choice fanatics are still at work, still trying to inflict their own religious views on others, still trying to hide their anti-woman feelings, still trying to keep us from controlling our own bodies and our own lives."
Yet here is McCorvey today, on the steps of the supreme court where those rights were laid down: "These steps are covered in blood! 'Equal justice under the law' - what crock! If there is no right for a child to be born, there is no justice at all."
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