Norma McCorvey, AKA Jane Roe: A Pro-Life Fraud? Some Initial Thoughts.

Yesterday, FX released a documentary entitled AKA Jane Roe, which purports to bring us the stunning revelation that Norma McCorvey, AKA Jane Roe of the historic Roe v. Wade case, was not the person she appeared to be. Norma made national headlines back in 1995 with her conversion to evangelical Protestant Christianity and, around the same time, she began stumping for the pro-life movement in an apparently sincere effort to overturn the historic case that bore her pseudonym. In 1998, she made a second conversion to Roman Catholicism and continued her pro-life work for many years after. When she died in February 2017, she was apparently still pro-life and received a Catholic funeral.

Like many, I was shocked to hear this revelation. I can remember as a young soldier stationed at Ft. Campbell Kentucky, reading her memoir Won By Love, in which she tells of working at an abortion clinic and then being befriended by members of Operation Rescue who had moved in next door, with her conversion to evangelical Protestant Christianity and to the pro-life movement being the end result. From what I remember of the memoir, it didn’t have the marks of someone who was writing insincerely or who had been brainwashed. In fact, she still spoke in glowing terms of Gloria Allred, a well-known pro-choice lawyer who had befriended her.

The documentary includes a purported “deathbed confession” in which Norma confesses that she was an actor, that she was paid to say what she said by the pro-life movement, and that if someone wants to get an abortion, “It’s no skin off my a**.” Should we accept this apparent “deathbed confession” at face value, and just admit the fact that Norma McCorvey was a fraud?

Not so fast. First of all, let’s admit from the outset that we all have biases. I’m a pro-life Catholic and would obviously like to believe that Norma McCorvey was sincere in what she did for about 20 or so years, in stumping against abortion. However, the documentary is a media form fraught with risk. The documentarian gets to choose what information the viewer sees or doesn’t see. And Nick Sweeney, who filmed the documentary, is not an impartial party. Identifying as gay himself, he mentions in an interview with The Daily Beast that “one of the saddest parts of the story” was McCorvey’s relationship with her girlfriend Connie (Norma left Connie sometime after her conversion, as the Roman Catholic Church proscribes same-sex sexual relations). Besides McCorvey, Rob Schenck, a former pro-life leader who has since come down on the side of Roe (apparently he’s now of the belief that abortion is a tragedy, but we shouldn’t attempt to legislate), is the main “prosecution witness” that the documentary gives us against the pro-life movement. In the documentary, he mentions Norma’s smoking, her drunken tirades against the pro-life leaders, saying that they didn’t pay her enough (which Schenck affirms). The documentary also reveals that she received around $500,000 over the course of 20 years. It’s also mentioned that some pro-life groups didn’t have her on the payroll for her support.

I’ll say I’ve not watched the documentary, I’ve read a review or two, as well as the news reports leading up to the movie’s release on Friday. However, I want to share a few of my first impressions.

Norma McCorvey’s sincerity, or lack thereof, is simply immaterial to the truth of the pro-life cause. Unless one is planning on using her testimonials in one’s pro-life work, one doesn’t even need to come up with an opinion on this bombshell revelation. I’m pro-life because I believe that it’s never okay to intentionally kill an innocent human being. If you are pro-life simply because of the charisma or “larger than life” status of a few pro-life leaders, I suggest you take a long, hard look at your life and take steps to ground your moral values in the transcendent.
The fact that some pro-life leaders use and abuse speakers does nothing to show us the truth or falsehood of the pro-life position. I once saw an ad, I think it was on the Flat Earth Society Website or some such, and it said something to the effect of, “Pope Pius III, leader of the Roman Catholic Church, believed that the world was flat. Hitler believed that it was round. Who are you going to believe?” While this claim is likely not factual (the roundness of the earth was a well-established scientific fact well before the 1200s, when Pope Pius III reigned), we all recognize the craziness of relying on the moral uprightness of a cause’s proponents as a proxy for the truth or falsity of that cause’s claims. Even if 99% of pro-life leaders were shown to be immoral, that wouldn’t shake my convictions for a second, because my convictions are based on the bedrock of the moral law, not on mere testimonials.
We should be skeptical of documentaries. And I’m not just saying that because I’m pro-life and Catholic, and this documentary is portraying a pro-life Catholic in a bad light. I would say the same thing if the film showed a pro-choice leader recanting on her death bed, saying she had only done it for the money. Conversion hoaxes, while they do happen, are rare. One prime example was the Leo Taxil affair. Taxil was a known atheist rhetorician who faked a conversion to Catholicism in the late 1800s, fooling even Pope Leo XIII, until he finally revealed his hoax in 1897. Leo Taxil was apparently a misanthrope, even concocting a whole line of anti-Masonic tropes simply for the joy of deceiving religious people. While Sweeney admits he perceived Norma McCorvey’s religious convictions as sincere, there’s still the problem of her pro-life “conversion.” But to get back to my point, we should be skeptical of the documentarian because he/she gets to decide what evidence we see. Nick Sweeney might not have a dog in the fight with regards to abortion, but he does have a personal interest in LGBT issues, which do intersect with with Norma McCorvey’s life, as I’ll explain in a bit. I would encourage everyone who watches this documentary to also consider alternative points of view (I’ll get into these shortly).
Fr. Frank Pavone, who purports to have known Norma McCorvey well, and was sort of a spiritual mentor for her for the duration of her time on this earth as a Catholic (1998-2017), offers a different perspective. He says that Norma McCorvey asked them, near the end of her life, to make sure that they carried on her pro-life work. He said that when she was angry, she was liable to say angry things against her pro-life comrades, but ultimately she always landed on the side of the pro-life position. He knew her well, and not just in passing–he mentioned still having text messages from her talking about the filming of the documentary, for example.
The film’s main witness (other than Norma McCorvey) against the pro-life movement is the Reverend Robert Schenck. Schenck is a former pro-life leader who has expressed regret for how McCorvey was used by the pro-life movement (he claims they didn’t pay her enough). Having come around more recently to a more progressive stance on LGBT issues, he also expresses regret that he told Norma that she had to leave her girlfriend Connie because her relationship was sinful. I’m skeptical of Schenck’s claims because he’s not impartial, and he does have an ax to grind, even if that ax-grinding is some sort of penitential exercise to make up for his years in the anti-Roe, anti-LGBT camp. While it’s alleged that Norma McCorvey was “used” by the pro-life movement, the whole concept of “using” a person is very nebulous, and one could simply accuse the pro-choice movement of having done the same thing to Norma McCorvey in the years prior to 1995. In fact, the political responses to this documentary evince a clear willingness among some progressives to “use” the deceased McCorvey’s story as ammunition against the pro-life movement. For example, take a look at this tweet from NY Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which was deleted 18 minutes after it was posted (retrieved from ProPublica):
I will add that, if pro-life leaders did “use” Norma McCorvey, then shame on them. The problem is that finding a definition of “use” that everyone will agree on is almost impossible, and our parsing of the facts is going to be greatly affected by where we already stand on the abortion debate.
We shouldn’t obstinately refuse to consider the evidence in the film. Although my previously existing biases lead me to want to believe in Norma’s sincerity, I’m open to evidence from the other side. It is hard for others who personally knew Norma (such as Fr. Frank Pavone) to be so impartial, because for them, they feel like a beloved friend’s reputation is at stake. It’s VERY difficult to think that a close friend might be a fake. I’ve been in that position before, and even had to break up an old friendship when I concluded that the accusations against him were probably true. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But for the rest of us, we should take the documentary’s claims seriously, while simultaneously evaluating evidence which has surfaced from those who knew McCorvey intimately during the last few years of her life. As a Catholic Christian, I believe that Jesus Christ Himself is Truth, and that nothing, even clinging to cherished beliefs about certain people, should stand in the way of my discovering the truth.
Just as we shouldn’t dismiss the film as a kneejerk reaction, we also shouldn’t uncritically accept it as gospel. While the “deathbed confession”, which comes straight from McCorvey’s mouth, seems particularly damning, there are other explanations which are more charitable to Norma and do not involve her having lived a lie for 20+ years. It’s well known that she drank a lot of alcohol at times and suffered from mental instability. She had a personal history of being exposed to violence, and her childhood story is simply tragic. Fr. Frank Pavone has spoken of her angry outbursts in which she would say that she was done with the pro-life movement, and Robert Schenck has said that she would get drink and accuse the pro-life movement of not paying her enough. Thus, there is evidence that she was not a completely mentally stable individual. We don’t know what Norma’s mental health diagnoses were, but they may have included alcohol use disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and perhaps others we’re not aware of. Some people who have certain mental health disorders have a lack of control at certain times, saying certain things in anger or sadness that are an attempt to lash out at others and that don’t reflect what they really believe. Also, in certain personality disorders, an individual might lack a strong sense of self, or might have love-hate relationships with people close to them, at one moment adoring those closest to them, and at the next, absolutely despising them. Then, mere hours or days after telling someone off or cursing them out, the person returns as if nothing had happened. Finally, certain alcoholic abuse sequelae (such as Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome) result in a person’s completely misremembering major events of their life and even confabulating information. Please note that I’m NOT saying that Norma McCorvey had these conditions. The fact is that we just don’t know. But while most people would never repudiate the last 20 years of their life as a lie, there are certain mental conditions that COULD explain Norma McCorvey’s comments as not representing her true beliefs, or the totality of her situation. A more charitable interpretation of her statements is that perhaps she was angry at pro-life leaders that day, and just gave the documentary cameras what she thought they wanted to hear as a way of angrily lashing out at people who’d hurt her. The fact is that we don’t know. What we do know is that, according to Fr. Frank Pavone, she kept her ties with the pro-life movement up to the end of her life, and that testimony, at least, should count for something. Finally, the fact that Norma McCorvey was paid by the pro-life movement shouldn’t surprise anyone. People who travel the country stumping for a cause typically don’t work for free, unless they are already independently wealthy (which Norma McCorvey was not). Whether she was overpaid or underpaid is a separate question, but the fact that she received hundreds of thousands of dollars for her speaking engagements is banal. But let’s remember what the documentary purports to tell about Norma is a very damning revelation about her character. If these claims are true, then she is, at worst, a liar and a manipulative, evil person. Or, she could be severely mentally ill and deserving our compassion. I don’t think we should believe that anyone is a bald-faced liar without very good evidence. Thus, let’s look at all of this information with a critical eye and not jump to conclusions.

I’m interested in seeing where this discussion leads us. Thankfully, since I’m not close to Norma McCorvey, and I don’t typically use her testimony in my own pro-life writing, I’m not obligated to make a decision one way or the other. But let’s pray for Norma’s friends as they deal with these revelations. Let’s pray that the truth will be known as it should be. And let’s pray that Norma’s soul finds rest in the arms of Jesus Christ.

Just a Little Blog

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