Texas Has Turned Citizen Against Citizen Over Abortion. How Did We Get Here?

Oct. 29, 2021
By Joshua Prager

Before the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that abortion was legal in all 50 states, the case did nothing for the women of Texas, where it began. A federal panel in Dallas ruled that Texas’ anti-abortion laws were unconstitutional. But the panel was concerned about interfering in state affairs. And so although it granted doctors and women the legal right to perform and have abortions, they could still be prosecuted.

“Apparently, we’re free to try them,” Dallas County’s District Attorney Henry Wade told the press, “so we’ll still do that.” Fearing the consequences, a hospital refused to abort the pregnancy of a 15-year-old girl who said she had been raped by her father.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/29/opinion/roe-v-wade-texas-abortion-law.html


How the Real Jane Roe Shaped the Abortion Wars

The all-too-human plaintiff of Roe v. Wade captured the messy contradictions hidden by a polarizing debate.

By Margaret Talbot
September 13, 2021

Roe v. Wade may be the rare Supreme Court decision that most Americans can name, but it’s also one of the few that many volubly disparage—and not just anti-abortion activists who want to get rid of it altogether. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a staunch advocate of access to abortion but an open critic of the reasoning behind Roe. She thought the rationale should have centered on preventing sex discrimination rather than on preserving a right to privacy. “The image you get from reading the Roe v. Wade opinion is it’s mostly a doctor’s-rights case—a doctor’s right to prescribe what he thinks his patient needs,” Ginsburg told the legal writer and scholar Jeffrey Rosen, in 2019. “My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a doctor’s-right notion, but a woman’s right to control her own destiny, to be able to make choices without a Big Brother state telling her what she can and cannot do.”

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/how-the-real-jane-roe-shaped-the-abortion-wars


‘Roe baby’ whose conception sparked landmark abortion ruling comes forward to share her name — and her story

Shelley Lynn Thornton was publicly identified in an excerpt published from an upcoming book

Timothy Bella
September 9, 2021

The child of “Jane Roe,” whose conception brought about the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade on a woman’s legal right to an abortion, came forward for the first time Thursday after decades of secrecy where she was known only as the “Roe baby.”

Shelley Lynn Thornton was publicly identified in an excerpt published in the Atlantic of journalist Joshua Prager’s upcoming book “The Family Roe: An American Story,” which explores those connected to the landmark 1973 case. In the excerpt, Thornton, 51, of Tucson, opened up about her life and the complex family history connected to the “Roe baby” over the last half-century.

Continued: https://www.thelily.com/roe-baby-whose-conception-sparked-landmark-abortion-ruling-comes-forward-to-share-her-name-and-her-story/


How the Anti-Abortion Movement Is Responding to Jane Roe’s “Deathbed Confession”

How the Anti-Abortion Movement Is Responding to Jane Roe’s “Deathbed Confession”

By Ruth Graham
May 22, 2020

The pro-life movement has always loved a conversion story. People who reject their former lives working for pro-choice causes are some of the most prominent voices in the movement, and the existence of abortion regret—a woman changing her mind after it’s too late—is a key legislative and rhetorical tactic. So when the real-life “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade announced two decades after that landmark Supreme Court case that she had realized abortion ought to be illegal after all, she became an instant star within the pro-life movement.

A bombshell documentary airing Friday night on FX adds a final shocking twist to Norma McCorvey’s ideologically eventful life. In AKA Jane Roe, McCorvey offers what she calls a “deathbed confession”: Actually, she was basically pro-choice all along and only became a pro-life activist for the money.

Continued: https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/05/jane-roe-norma-mccorvey-confession-anti-abortion.html