Norma McCorvey was born Norma Leah Nelson in Simmesport, Louisiana on September 22, 1947. She stole money from a gas station at the age of 10, ran away and was sent to a reform school. She was later sent to live with a relative, who raped her for weeks. At the age of 16, she married Elwood McCorvey, who she said beat her. She returned pregnant to live with her mother, gave birth to a daughter, and divorced her husband. She had drug and alcohol problems and left her baby with her mother. When she returned, she was arrested by the police for abandoning the child. Her mother to legally adopt that child. She gave birth to another child and gave the baby up for adoption in 1967. She became pregnant a third time in 1969 and was unable to obtain an illegal abortion. This lead her to become the anonymous plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion in the United States. She gave birth to her third child and gave her up for adoption. She had little contact with her lawyers Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, never went to court or was asked to testify, and was uninvolved in proceedings that took three years to reach the Supreme Court.
Later in life she switched sides, from abortion rights advocate to anti-abortion campaigner. In 1995, she was baptized as a born-again Christian. A 1998 documentary, Roe vs. Roe: Baptism by Fire, detailed her conversion. In 1998, she underwent another conversion to Roman Catholicism. In 2005, she petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, claiming abortions harmed women. The court called the issue moot and denied the petition. Her books include I Am Roe: My Life, Roe v. Wade, and Freedom of Choice written with Andy Meisler and Won by Love written with Gary Thomas. She died of heart failure on February 18, 2017 at the age of 69.
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