Plaintiff in Roe v Wade abortion case
Born: September 22, 1947;
Died: February 18, 2017
NORMA McCorvey, who has died aged 69, was better known as Jane Roe, the plaintiff in the 1973 court case which led to the US Supreme Court's landmark decision to legalise abortion.
McCorvey was 22, unmarried, unemployed and pregnant for the third time when in 1969 she sought to have an abortion in Texas, where the procedure was illegal except to save a woman's life.
The subsequent lawsuit, known as Roe v Wade, led to the Supreme Court's 1973 ruling that established abortion rights, although by that time McCorvey had given birth and given her daughter up for adoption.
Decades later, Ms McCorvey underwent a conversion, becoming an evangelical Christian and joining the anti-abortion movement.
A short time later, she underwent another religious conversion and became a Roman Catholic.
"I'm 100% pro-life," she said in 1998. "I don't believe in abortion even in an extreme situation. If the woman is impregnated by a rapist, it's still a child. You're not to act as your own God."
After the court's ruling, McCorvey had lived quietly for several years before revealing herself as Jane Roe in the 1980s. She also confessed to lying when she said the pregnancy was the result of rape.
She was born in Louisiana, spending part of her childhood in the small village of Lettsworth. Her family then moved to Houston and later Dallas, where in her 1994 autobiography, I Am Roe: My Life, Roe V Wade, And Freedom of Choice, she recounts stealing money at the age of 10 from the petrol station where she worked afternoons and weekends and running away to Oklahoma City before being returned home by police. She was eventually sent to a state reform school for girls in the northern Texas town of Gainesville, living there from the age of 11 to 15.
She married at the age of 16, but separated shortly after while she was pregnant. She gave custody of her daughter to her mother. She gave a second child up for adoption, but when she got pregnant a third time she decided to have an abortion. She said she couldn't afford to travel to one of the handful of states where it would have been legal.
Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, she remained an ardent supporter of abortion rights and worked for a time at a Dallas women's clinic where abortions were performed.
Her autobiography included abortion-rights sentiments along with details about dysfunctional parents, reform school, petty crime, drug abuse, alcoholism, an abusive husband, an attempted suicide and lesbianism.
But a year later, she was baptised before network TV cameras by a most improbable mentor: The Rev Philip "Flip" Benham, the leader of Operation Rescue, now known as Operation Save America.
McCorvey joined the cause and staff of Mr Benham, who had befriended her when the anti-abortion group moved next door to the abortion clinic where she was working.
McCorvey also said that her religious conversion led her to give up her lover, Connie Gonzales. She said the relationship turned platonic in the early 1990s and that once she became a Christian she believed homosexuality was wrong.
She recounted her evangelical conversion and stand against abortion in the January 1998 book Won By Love, which ends with McCorvey happily involved with Operation Rescue.
But by August of that year, she had changed faiths to Catholicism. And though she was still against abortion, she had left Operation Rescue, saying she had reservations about the group's confrontational style.
She formed her own group, Roe No More Ministry, in 1997 and travelled around the country speaking out against abortion. In 2005, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge by McCorvey to the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling.
In May 2009, she was arrested on trespassing charges after joining more than 300 anti-abortion demonstrators when President Barack Obama spoke at the University of Notre Dame.
In July 2009, she was among demonstrators arrested for disrupting Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court nomination hearing.
McCorvey died at an assisted living centre in Katy, Texas. She has been suffering from heart failure. She is survived by a daughter, Melissa.
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