AKA Jane Roe
AKA Jane Roe is a 2017 documentary about Norma McCorvey, grifter and the plaintiff of the Roe. v Wade case. Pro-lifers often promote their cause alongside images of happy, intact, middle-class Christian families, telling people that voting to ban abortion is voting for more of that, while rarely explaining how the chain of causality is supposed to work. AKA Jane Roe, a well-made, compelling movie, provides a look into the real world.
To anyone who knows the reality of abortion patient demographics, McCorvey's early life is not particularly surprising. Her mother was an alcoholic. At the age of ten, she robbed a gas station, ran away from home, and was declared a ward of the state. She alleges that her cousin raped her and her husband physically abused her. Shortly after the birth of one of her first child, she developed a drinking and drug problem. According to McCorvey, her mother tricked her into signing adoption papers and then kicked her out of the house; her mother says she signed them willingly. The filmmakers believe the mother.
By the time she was pregnant with the fetus at the center of the Roe case, she had already given up two children for adoption. She wanted an abortion, was denied it, and gave birth long before the case was decided. That child, too, was given up for adoption. The system worked, but it didn't turn her into a middle-class, Bible-believing Christian. That would come later. Initially, she tried to be part of the pro-choice movement, but they kept their distance from her. She initially claimed she had become pregnant through rape, something she later admitted was not true.
In 1995, she had a dramatic "conversion," becoming a pro-life, Bible-believing Christian, first evangelical, then Catholic. Some might say that it's rather easy to preach sexual morality when you're running on fifty years old. The film makes the dramatic revelation that she never believed in the pro-life cause. She was paid about 450,000$ for her activism. Exactly when she started and stopped her activism is not clear, but it couldn't have been more than 45,000$ a year, not a bonanza but not nothing either. She is pro-choice, but not so much that she expresses any remorse for advocating a cause she didn't believe in in exchange for money. Though it seemed like the filmmakers wanted to be sympathetic, she comes across as a selfish person who has never in her life taken responsibility for anything.
Of course, McCorvey was not dealt a good hand in life, and she was no menace to society. She's not the villain of the story, just a bumbling person manipulated by those with more smarts and money, who turn her into a symbol of ideologies she doesn't really care about.
One formerly pro-life leader claimed that they knew she wasn't fully on board with the cause, privately believing that abortion should be legal in the first trimester. The victims of the story are the Christian conservative masses who believed in the power of Jesus to redeem the sinner. Enter into my heart, the spirit of Jesus, so that I will not sin! McCorvey was born and lived in the Bible Belt. She went to school long before they became woke. After being declared a ward of the state, she lived in a Catholic boarding school. Later, she spent over a decade immersed in the Christian conservative subculture. The spirit of Jesus never entered her heart. The best you can say about conservative Christianity is that for only some people, it works and makes them happy. But it isn't a solution to universal social problems like those McCorvey's life demonstrates. Maybe American evangelicals should rediscover their Calvinist roots and the idea of predestination.
A final wrinkle, not in the film. What became of the fetus Roe would have let be "murdered?" In a demonstration of the self-defeating nature of anti-abortion laws, she said in response to the overturning of Roe, "too many times has a woman's choice, voice, and individual freedom been decided for her by others. Being that I am bound to the center of Roe v. Wade, I have a unique perspective on this matter." She added, "I believe that the decision to have an abortion is a private, medical choice that should be between a woman, her family, and her doctor. We have lived in times of uncertainty and insecurity before, but to have such a fundamental right taken away and this ruling be overturned concerns me of what lies ahead."
We never hear about the man who fathered McCorvey's daughter. Maybe someday, DNA testing will track him down.