By Mary Rourke

Los Angeles Times

Norma McCorvey, the once-anonymous plaintiff in the Roe v.Wade case in which the Supreme Court affirmed the right of women to have abortions, has died. She was 69.

McCorvey, who later joined the anti-abortion movement, died Saturday in Katy, Texas, the Associated Press reported.

As the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, McCorvey represented thousands of women who had searched “for a safe termination of an unwanted pregnancy at a time when virtually all abortions were illegal,” said David Garrow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Norma McCorvey v. Wade.”

“Norma McCorvey will very much be remembered,” he said in a 2007 interview with The Times.

In 1970, McCorvey was more than two months pregnant when she met lawyers Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, who were preparing to contest the Texas abortion law. At the time, it was illegal to have an abortion in the state, except by a doctor’s orders to save a woman’s life. The lawyers were looking for a plaintiff who wanted to terminate her pregnancy.

McCorvey signed the suit that contested the law, on the grounds that it violated the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees the right to free choice and privacy.

She used the alias “Jane Roe” so she could avoid getting embroiled in the public debate about abortion. The case moved slowly from Dallas District Court to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, McCorvey gave birth to her baby. She never had the abortion she was seeking.

The Supreme Court announced its decision in January 1973. Seven justices voted that making abortion illegal was unconstitutional. The other two voted not to change the existing law.

For some years, McCorvey remained secretive about her role in the case. When she revealed her identity in an interview on Dallas television news in 1984, it was to show her support for Roe v. Wade, which she referred to as “my law.”

In the many more interviews that followed, McCorvey described her troubled life and eventually told her full story in “I Am Roe,” an autobiography she wrote with Andy Meisler in 1994.

“I am a rough woman, born into pain and anger and raised mostly by myself,” she wrote. She described her years as a teenage runaway and reform school inmate, a high school dropout who drifted from job to job. She was an addict and “a complete failure,” she wrote.

“Baby Roe” was her third child, a girl like the others. Each one had a different father and was given up for adoption because McCorvey felt unfit to raise them, she said.

Her personal story made her an imperfect fit with both the abortion-rights leaders and the anti-abortion activists. Neither side fully embraced her.

After signing the affidavit that launched the Roe v. Wade case, McCorvey had little more to do with it. She and her lawyers agreed that she would not be called on to give a deposition or appear in court.

Weddington argued before the judges that the Ninth Amendment gives a pregnant woman, not the court, the right to decide whether she will terminate her pregnancy.

The defendant in the case, District Attorney Henry Wade, argued against her in support of the existing Texas law. He already had prosecuted several doctors for performing illegal abortions in the state.

When Dallas court judges decided in favor of “Roe,” Wade said he would appeal their decision. In the meantime, he said, he would continue to prosecute doctors who performed abortions.

Once her baby was born, in the summer of 1970, McCorvey lost track of the case. She learned about the Supreme Court decision by reading about it in the newspaper.

For years, McCorvey said she was proud of her role in legalizing abortion. She also said it didn’t do her any good.

Norma Leah Nelson was born Sept. 22, 1947, in Lettesworth, La., north of Baton Rouge. The family moved to Houston, where her father, Olin, repaired radios and televisions and her mother, Mary Mildred, worked as a waitress. The couple divorced when Norma was 13. She moved to Dallas with her mother and her older brother.

Starting at about age 10, she began running away from home and spending time in reform schools. It was there that she realized she was a lesbian, she later wrote.

At 16, she married Woody McCorvey, a sheet metal worker she met in Dallas. They moved to El Monte to look for work.

When she got pregnant, he beat her and said the baby wasn’t his. She went home to her mother, gave birth to her first baby and named her Melissa. Soon afterward, McCorvey’s mother took custody of the infant.

McCorvey got pregnant a second time during a brief relationship with a man she worked with at a Dallas hospital. When the baby was born, the child’s father adopted her and cut ties with McCorvey.

Pregnant for a third time, she left her job with a traveling carnival and went to live with her father, who had moved to Dallas. After a difficult birth, she saw “Baby Roe” once before the girl went home with her adoptive parents.

At her father’s apartment, McCorvey slid into a deep depression, took an overdose of pills and drank a bottle of bourbon. She was near death when he came home from work.

The incident left her searching for a reason to live. She found it in her alias. Jane Roe was her alter-ego, the powerful woman she always wanted to be, “the other woman, whose name was on the Supreme Court papers and some day, maybe, in the history books,” McCorvey wrote in her autobiography.

“Without Jane Roe, without a cause to fight for and a purpose for living, the original Norma would never have survived.”

Several years after her suicide attempt, McCorvey was leaving a grocery store with her purse full of stolen food. The store manager, Connie Gonzalez, caught her but didn’t report her to the police. The two women began dating, and soon afterward McCorvey moved in with Gonzalez.

“Connie has taken care of me in hundreds of ways,” McCorvey wrote in her autobiography. “I have taken care of her as best I can.”

With her new domestic arrangement, McCorvey settled into “regular person” status, she later said. Then, Weddington telephoned to tell her about the Dallas reporter who wanted to interview her. Among other reasons for agreeing, McCorvey said, she wanted public recognition for her part in the high-profile case.

She began to receive invitations to speak on college campuses and before women’s groups. She consulted on a television movie, “Roe v. Wade,” that starred actress Holly Hunter as McCorvey and won two Emmy Awards in 1990.

But McCorvey wasn’t prepared for how the abortion controversy came to her front door. She received hate mail. She found doll clothes and trash scattered on her lawn. One morning in April 1989, someone shot out the windows of her house.

A few days later, still frightened by that attack, she attended a pro-choice rally in Washington, D.C. She had been invited to attend the event, which was coordinated by the National Organization for Women. When she arrived in Washington, however, she felt she was all but ignored. It was a familiar experience.

“They never gave me the respect I thought I deserved,” McCorvey said of abortion-rights leaders in a 1995 television interview.

Her doubts about legal abortion increased when she went to work at a Dallas abortion clinic. She met women who used the medical procedure for birth control. She worried over the lack of professional counseling at the clinic for women who were ambivalent about terminating their pregnancies. It upset her to see a doctor with bare feet performing surgery.

It also continued to bother McCorvey, years after the fact, that her lawyers never made it clear to her that the Roe v. Wade case would probably take too long for her to benefit from a favorable verdict. In her view, they used her.

“I felt increasingly alienated from the pro-abortion movement,” McCorvey wrote in a second memoir, “Won By Love,” written with Gary Thomas in 1997.

Her doubts about Roe v. Wade were tested when Operation Rescue, a leading anti-abortion group, opened an office in the strip mall where she worked in the clinic. At first, McCorvey exchanged snide remarks with the group and nicknamed their national president, the Rev. Philip Benham, “Flipper.”

Eventually, she and Benham began to talk. She was baptized by him in a Dallas swimming pool in August 1995. She quit her job at the clinic and joined Operation Rescue.

In January 1998, McCorvey testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee that she regretted her part in helping to make abortion legal.

“I am dedicated to spending the rest of my life undoing the law that bears my name,” she told the Senate panel in 1998. “I would like nothing more than to have this law overturned.”

She formed a speaker’s bureau, “Roe No More,” and joined Operation Rescue protest rallies but gradually drifted back to “normal person” status. By then, she was confident that her story would be remembered, in part because it was so unusual.

“I do not fit many people’s idea of a historical role model,” she said.