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The child whose conception prompted the trial that became Roe v. Wade is now a 51-year-old woman ready to share her story.
Shelley Lynn Thornton has come forward after decades of secrecy to publicly identify herself as “Baby Roe” in Joshua Prager’s new book “The Family Roe: An American Story”, which will be released on September 14 and was previewed in The Atlantique Thursday.
“My association with Roe started and ended because I was conceived,” Thornton said in the snippet.
Her birth mother’s trial became the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case that guaranteed women’s right to have abortions legally across the country, even though she never went through the process.
“In his majority opinion, Judge Harry Blackmun noted that a ‘pregnancy will come to term before the end of the usual appeals process’,” writes Prager.
Still, the Dallas waitress’ challenge to Texas law resulted in a drastic change in laws across the country.
Texas is epicenter of abortion fight again after Supreme Court refused to block restrictive state law banning abortions as early as six weeks pregnant and allowing anyone in the United States to sue providers abortion or others that help women get the procedure done after that. Time range.
Thornton is the daughter of Norma McCorvey, the woman originally identified in court documents by the pseudonym Jane Roe. McCorvey, who revealed her identity shortly after the landmark affair, died at age 69 in 2017 after a complicated public life.
McCorvey was initially pro-choice, then shifted to an anti-abortion stance following a religious conversion, then revealed in a stunning deathbed confession in a documentary that she was paid an exorbitant sum by a religious organization to pose as an anti-abortion activist, even though she didn’t believe that point of view.
Thornton was born in a Dallas hospital in 1970 as the third of McCorvey’s three children, none of whom she raised. She was 2 years old when the Roe v. Wade fell and was living with her adoptive parents in Texas, and her very existence has become a symbol for anti-abortion activists.
Thornton’s adoptive mother, Ruth Schmidt, told her when she was young that she was adopted, and Thornton said she often yearns to know her birth parents. McCorvey began searching for Thornton in 1989, appearing on the “TODAY” show expressing his hope of finding his third child. She already knew her other two daughters, but had little information about Thornton.
A National Enquirer investigation found Thornton when she was a teenage girl living outside Seattle and the publication informed her that she was McCorvey’s biological daughter. However, at his request, his name was removed from the subsequent article, published in 1989.
Thornton began to “shake and cry” upon learning the harsh truth that she was the complainant’s child in the famous case.
The abortion debate entered Thornton’s life in 1991, when she became pregnant at age 20. She decided to have the child, but did not understand why the decision to abort should be “a concern of the government”.
In the National Enquirer article, she was described as pro-life, which had bothered her because, as she told Prager, she told the reporter “she didn’t see herself having an abortion. “.
For Thornton, the pro-life represented “a group of religious fanatics walking around and demonstrating.”
But then, she didn’t consider herself pro-choice either.
“Norma was pro-choice, and it seemed to Shelley that having an abortion wouldn’t make her any different from Norma,” Prager wrote.
Yet the abortion was “not part of who I was,” which is why she had the baby.
Thornton, who is now a mother of three living in Arizona, nearly met McCorvey in person in 1994 before an angry phone conversation derailed the meeting. McCorvey said Thornton should have thanked her for not having her aborted.
“I was like, ‘What ?! I’m supposed to thank you for getting me pregnant … and then abandoning me,'” Thornton recalls. “I told her I would never, ever thank her for not having an abortion.”
Thornton has since met her two half-sisters, but she did not reunite with McCorvey until his death.
After years of keeping her secret and fearing that someone else would share her story publicly, she decided to share it herself.
“I want everyone to understand,” she said, “that this is something that I have chosen to do.”
Elisha Fieldstadt contributed.
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