Farewell Jane Roe, complicated champion of abortion rights
by Rosemary McLeod
February 23 2017

OPINION: It was Jane Roe's fate to be the fragile basis on which American women won abortion rights back in 1973. When she died this week her attitude to that had gone full circle, delightful ammunition for opponents of women's rights, though no great surprise in itself. She was human, after all, which is to say full of contradictions.

Her real name was Norma McCorvey, a solo mother of two children when she got pregnant a third time. She said she had been raped, which would have made the process of getting an abortion easier, but was a bad liar, wavered in her account, and was caught out. Finally, while her case, now famous as Roe vs Wade, progressed to the United States Supreme Court for a final decision based in part on her right to privacy, she carried the child to term and gave birth to it.

Continued at source: Stuff.co: http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/columnists/89643820/Rosemary-McLeod-Farewell-Jane-Roe-complicated-champion-of-abortion-rights