Chapter 25

The three Christians who had led Norma from choice to life had been well situated to win her over. Little Emily had pulled at the heart of a woman injured by the surrender of three daughters. As for Flip Benham and Ronda Mackey, as the filmmaker O’Hara put it, “he was a father figure and she was this sexy woman.”

Norma did not disguise her feelings for Mackey. “I started loving you the day you let your first born go with me alone,” she wrote to Mackey on her birthday. She called her Rondadita and added in a subsequent note: “You are not only beautiful on the outside but also on the inside.”

Such effusions did not make Mackey uncomfortable; she thought of Norma as a child, she says, a child nineteen years her senior whom God and her daughter and her boss had helped to enlist in the fight against abortion. Still, Mackey spoke to her Operation Rescue colleagues, and Norma wrote to them in turn. “I just couldn’t believe [Mackey] thought I would want anything other than her friendship,” wrote Norma. “Too much gossip.”

Mackey, meantime, had had it with Benham. “If I didn’t show up on time, Flip would call and yell at me,” she says. “I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is supposed to be volunteer.” In early 1997, Mackey decided to leave O.R. to volunteer instead at a crisis pregnancy center in Garland, a few miles east. Norma was bereft. “I’m sad, very sad,” she wrote to Mackey.

Norma had also contemplated leaving. Benham had come between her and Connie. But only now that he had driven Mackey away did Norma decide to join her.

Norma’s upset aside, it made financial sense for her to leave Benham. She was in great demand as a speaker. (Her words—among them a promise to “strive in the name of Jesus to end this holocaust”—had just been cast in bronze at a memorial for the unborn in Chattanooga.) Benham, who was not himself driven by money, had been indifferent to the money he knew Norma could command. “It’s an industry,” he acknowledges of the pro-life movement. “We’ll go ahead and get speakers and compete with each other for a piece of the pie.”

The pro-life pie had many different pieces, from its crisis pregnancy centers to those organizations that fought abortion with law or politics or direct action. That Norma had, for thirty months, resided in the last—alongside not only advocates of civil protest but those who fostered violence—had kept the more mainstream at bay. The National Right to Life Committee, for example, did not promote Norma’s film Reversing Roe for fear of aligning itself with Operation Rescue.

But Norma would now be leaving O.R. She would be open to all, and just in time for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Roe.

MUCH HAD CHANGED in that quarter-century. Roe was no longer a mere ruling. It was an orientation, a north star guiding all from judicial appointments to religious resolutions to political platforms. There was no surer gauge of political ideology in America than Roe, no surer prompt of legislation; thirty-nine states now required minors wanting abortions to get the consent of a judge or parent.

Roe, of course, had also become a business; there was always more to wring from it. And Norma was about to leave Benham when, that summer of 1997, she asked Mackey if she would help her start a ministry. “What hurt the most,” says Benham, “was that Miss Ronda went with her.”

Only two years before, Norma had told Ted Koppel that she believed in first-trimester abortions. Mackey had thus not thought Norma ready to share her story. “Her theology isn’t straight yet,” she told the press. “She’s like a new infant; a new baby doesn’t understand about the world around it.” But Norma’s theology was now in line, and Mackey got going on the newsletters and press releases that would be the meat of the ministry. Norma had her checks decorated with images of fetuses, and chose as her logo a smiling and ponytailed girl on a swing. Norma’s ghostwriter wove a mention of the ministry into her book’s last chapter. And Mackey then enlisted a born-again accountant she knew from church, a happy man named Ron Allen who, thirteen years after his rebirth, now did the books, pro bono, for Benham and a hundred or so Christian nonprofits. Roe No More Ministry was nearly incorporated when, on the last day of summer, its namesake turned fifty.

Middle age suited Norma. Her face was prettier than before, rounder and rouged and set off by a feathered cut that softened the permanent arch of her brows. Eager to promote a ministry in advance of a book, Norma hit the road again, off to a conference in Tampa to join Benham for a session on the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Privately, Norma did not speak kindly of Benham. She would soon write to a friend of her joy that he had been imprisoned for trespassing at a Virginia high school. (Benham was handing out fliers to students.) But publicly, Norma told of their split in only the Christian terms he himself had taught her. (“A still, small voice told me God was calling me to something else,” she wrote.) Back beside Benham in Tampa, Norma cordially knelt so that he and a roomful of Christians could lay their hands upon her.

Norma, though, knew nothing of the Christian circuit. And days later, in Alabama, the Eternal Word Television Network turned her away at the door for wearing shorts. But Mackey was at her side, and Norma put on a skirt and knocked again. She was soon on air with Pavone while an on-screen real-time tally of abortions in America counted seventy-five performed during their twenty-three minutes together.

The circuit forbade more than mere immodesty—smoking and drinking and cursing, too. Norma was guilty of all three, not to mention homosexuality, and some worried about her. “You’ve got to be compassionate about change,” says her ghostwriter Thomas. “Let her grow, let her develop, let her be in a safe place. Don’t put her in front of a banquet.” But banquets raised money. They sold books. And Norma continued to peddle hers, a guest, that January of 1998, not only at countless crisis pregnancy centers but on Larry King Live and at the Senate, where John Ashcroft brandished, in pro-life solidarity, the sonogram pictures of a grandchild not yet born.

Seated before a Senate subcommittee, Norma was meant to speak only against abortion. But she chose to recall that she had been forced to carry a child she had not wanted. She spoke also of Sarah Weddington—the lawyer who had had an abortion but left uninvestigated whether her client might have one too. “She lied to me,” said Norma, repeating what she had told Ted Koppel.

It was clear that two-plus years after Norma’s conversion, the anger that had in part precipitated it remained. Still, Weddington offered up to the press no regrets but one. “I wish,” she said, “I had picked somebody else.” There had, however, been no one else for Weddington and Coffee to pick. Their other potential plaintiff, Marsha King, had been found not to have legal standing.

Norma was everywhere this silver anniversary of Roe; both the book and the film about her were released that month. They told very different stories. Won by Love told of a holy little girl who had helped Norma to know and love Jesus, whereas Roe vs. Roe rested on the forbidden love between two women. Still, the two stories were connected. For Norma’s rebirth had been contingent upon the renunciation of her homosexuality.

That renunciation fit snugly into the evangelical view that homosexuality is, at heart, a choice. “The lesbian nurse can be converted,” wrote the professor Carol Mason. “This is the moral of the story of Won by Love.” She adds: “We get the lesbian love of Connie Gonzales replaced by Christian love.”

Norma had not foreseen that exchange. She had, just after her baptism, told a Christian reporter that she would sleep with whomever she wished. But renouncing and then denying her homosexuality had proved to be the price of her conversion. Even so, she continued to pick up women in bars until, one night in Austin, an old and discomforting thought that she’d first confided to a friend in California a decade before overwhelmed her—the possibility, that is, that she might unknowingly buy a drink for the middle child she had given up. Said Norma: “Wouldn’t it be horrible to think that I slept with one of my daughters?”

Norma stopped going to gay bars. She contented herself with Connie, though to hear Norma tell it, Connie was everything but her partner—her mother, her godmother, her cousin, her “sister in Christ.”

Connie did not protest. She still rode beside Norma in their pickup, still shared a home with her if no longer a bed. This was enough. It had to be. “I don’t care what she does,” Connie had told O’Hara, beginning to cry on camera, “as long as she’s happy.” And sometimes she was. “YOUR THE REASON THAT I’M OK,” Norma wrote to Connie in January while off with Mackey on a book tour that took them through twelve states in fifteen days. “TAKE CARE MY SWEETIE . . . YOU’LL NEED TO TAKE CARE OF ME WHEN I DO GET BACK.”

Norma was in need of care. She had begun again to drink before interviews, favoring vodka, as she had years before, so as not to smell of alcohol. The interviews often ended badly. “She would throw the pen down and start cursing and walk off,” says Mackey. Other times, she would simply not show.

It was on Mackey, keeper of the ministry, to pick up the pieces. But the pieces could not easily be picked up; when Norma stood up Moody Radio, the Christian network was so angry that it considered barring all Thomas Nelson authors from its hundreds of affiliate stations. The publisher was angry, too, faxing Mackey that it still had eight thousand copies of Won by Love in its warehouse.

Mackey could handle a ministry, and also the chaperoning and upkeep of Norma: shots of B12 in the rear, pats on the back to feel for a bra. But the struggle to keep Norma to her word—and to mollify angry Christians when Norma went off script—was too much. “I started having panic attacks for the first time in my life,” says Mackey. Thirty-one years old, she found herself crying, short of breath, unable to eat. She alerted Thomas Nelson. The publisher stopped the tour.

Mackey and her husband believed in Norma, in the providence of her rebirth. “I know God wants to use you in a mighty way to reach millions of people,” Ron Mackey wrote to her. Mackey, who worked in information technology, had done his best to help Norma, joining the board of her ministry, minding his kids while his wife minded Norma. But Norma was sabotaging their efforts. Back in Dallas, the Mackeys turned to their pastor and Jesus, too, stopping by their chapel, wrote Ron, “to seek God.”

Sheats suggested more earthly help; Mackey was soon on meds and in therapy. After six years of battling Roe—“of going full blast against abortion,” as Ron wrote to Norma—Mackey needed to mend.

Norma was unchanged. She faxed and phoned Mackey at all hours, canceling interviews, arguing fees. And though Mackey had helped her for seven months at no cost, Norma emailed her in March that she’d have nothing more to do with her. Wrote Norma: “I’M LOOKING FOR ANOTHER FAMILY THAT I CAN LOVE IN SICKNESS IN LIFE, AND IN DEATH.” Norma grew angrier still when Mackey shared her note with a friend. “If I see Ronda again,” Norma told the woman, “it will take three or four people to pull me off her.”

Mackey had endured such outbursts from Norma for three years. She was at peace when, now, she cut Norma loose. She wrote back to say that she and her girls would miss her.

“I Love You,” she wrote to Norma. “Your Sister in Christ, Ronda.”

IN THE DECADE since Gloria Allred had led Norma away from the Texans who brought her to that DC march, Norma had come to know that there was always another someone ready to take her hand—to take a cut, too. She was Jane Roe. She soon had another agent and another gig, off to Indiana in March 1998 to join her ghostwriter Thomas at a pro-life banquet in Tippecanoe County. Still, the “insatiable yearning” that one journalist noted in her—for publicity, for love—remained. Norma wanted more.

Father Pavone understood that yearning. The rewards of ministering to a local parish had never been enough for him, and his holy war on abortion had lifted him nearly as high as Roe had Norma. The priest was now stationed in Rome, an official of the Pontifical Council for the Family. He hoped that Norma might lift him higher still, and he mailed her books and had her introduced to Catholics back in Dallas. “I recall hearing Norma likes hanging out with the Catholics,” says Fonda Lash, who coordinated sidewalk counseling for the local Catholic Pro-Life Committee. “It was going around.”

Still, despite Pavone’s influence on Norma, it was, as much as anyone, a Baptist pastor who was now leading her to the Catholic church.

DANIEL VINZANT HAD first seen Norma from across a sidewalk. He believed less in protest than in prayer; starting in 1994, he had driven north to Dallas once a week from his home in Waco to stand outside Norma’s clinic on Markville Drive with a psalter and rosary beads. When Norma became a Christian, Benham asked Vinzant to recite a prayer at her baptism, and it was Vinzant who invited those gathered to form a “hedge of protection” about her. Months later, Vinzant invited Norma to speak to his congregation at Trinity Church of Waco.

Vinzant had been born in Waco in 1956. His parents were blue-collar Baptists, and they had raised their four kids with “laughter and scripture,” says Vinzant. Jesus was a presence in his life. His beloved grandmother Alice Luceil read the Bible aloud to him; by age nine, Vinzant himself had read through it twice. Vinzant was not yet thirty when he was a pastor to some thirty families, a father of three children besides.

The only blight on those years was the loss of a fourth child seven months after her conception. Ten years after that miscarriage, in 1992, Vinzant awoke in a sweat with the life-altering thought, he says, that what had died within his wife was a baby, worse still, that he had never mourned her. He resolved to fight for the unborn and began, on summer days, to set up wading pools outside the local Planned Parenthood for kids to play in, “to show,” he says, “the contrast—here’s living, happy children.”

Trinity Church loved its sandy-haired pastor, his malapropisms and generosity; he was apt to say “spear” when he meant “sphere,” and collected his salary only after the church settled its other weekly debts. But Vinzant had a secret: though he was Baptist by birth and had gone to Baptist college and Baptist university and Baptist seminary, he increasingly wished to be Catholic. Even as Vinzant ministered to his own evangelical flock, he went to Mass every week of his pastorship, stealing away on Sunday mornings to a church across town, where he sat out of view in the choir loft.

Vinzant had first glimpsed Catholicism at eighteen, when a boy he’d mentored at church converted to Catholicism and invited him to his confirmation. The stained glass and incense and candles of that Catholic church in north Waco had entranced Vinzant, and he began to return to it for Mass, “picking up the liturgy,” he says, “picking up the movements.” Eighteen years later, his love for Catholicism deepened when he took up the pro-life fight. Four years after that, in 1996, he began a master’s program in Catholic theology at the University of Dallas, staying at its Dominican priory one weekend a month.

Vinzant had only just met Norma. But in the year since her baptism, they had come together at Operation Rescue meetings at that same priory, privately confiding, says Vinzant, their unease with both the harshness of O.R. and the abstemiousness of Benham. The death of Norma’s father, in late 1995, drew them closer; when Norma asked Vinzant where the souls of the dead go, he comforted her with Catholic dogma, telling her, he says, that her father had had the choice in his last hour to join God for eternity.

Vinzant let Norma know that he was now in town every month. She and Connie began to visit him at the priory, three friends drinking orange juice and watching squirrels jump amidst the mesquites and cedars. The following September, Norma and Connie began to join him monthly for Mass, too.

NORMA KNEW THAT another conversion would bring upon her another wave of press. But it was more than the prospect of publicity that drew her to Catholicism. Catholicism spoke to her. For if Norma wished of religion one thing it was absolution, the assurance that she could be forgiven not only Roe but all her trespasses, the drink and drugs and sex and relinquishment of children. She was comforted by confession. “She got to feel the forgiveness,” says Pavone. He adds, “Catholicism uses the senses much more than the Protestants.” This pleased Norma, the ash and wafer and incense and beads. In early 1998, she emailed Pavone to ask how to pray the rosary.

Norma was ready for a second religious rebirth. In May, one month after attending a Mass Pavone led in Houston, Norma emailed the priest. “The decision is in from the Big Guy,” she wrote. “I have it on good aurthory that I should become Catholic.” Pavone responded one minute later: “Praise the Lord!!!” He wrote that he would be informing the pope, and Norma requested that Pavone “tell him I love him and will look forward to hopefully just touching the hem of his garment.” Days later, Pavone emailed Norma that she was a vessel of God. “The work He wants to accomplish through you has only just begun,” he wrote.

The same was true of the work Pavone hoped to accomplish through Norma. He was contemplating when to make public her intentions when, off in Waco, on June 8, Norma did so herself. She told her friend Vinzant, along with his Protestant congregation, that she was ready to complete her spiritual journey “by coming home to my Mother Church, the Roman Catholic Church.”

Here was news. But it was not Vinzant who alerted the press. It was Pavone who immediately went to work on a press release—writing in the name of Norma, who then okayed “every word,” he says. “He would do that,” recalls his former personal assistant Jenn Morson. “ ‘This is what she would have said.’ ”

It was important to Pavone that the rendering of a second conversion, of a Catholic rebirth, be of the same supernatural stuff as an evangelical one. For Norma had attested that accepting Christ, and the holy words of her pastor, had pounded her heart and doused her in sweat and flooded her with tears and turned her “extremely hot” and “unbearably chilled” and so light she could “almost float.” Standing there at the altar of her church, Norma had, she wrote, seen in the eyes of her pastor Jesus Himself.

And so, one week after Norma’s new proclamation, the release Pavone sent to the world also invoked God. “I clearly heard the Heavenly Father say to me that I was to be with Him soon,” it quoted Norma. “I was very scared of this, thinking that it meant I was to die. I consulted my dear friend, Fr. Frank Pavone, head of Priests for Life, who has been the catalyst to bring me into the Catholic Church. I told him of my concerns, and his advice to me was to continue to pray and to ponder this message. I listened to him and came to realize that what God was actually saying to me was to ‘come ALL the way home to Him’ in his Church—the Church Jesus Christ Himself founded, the Mother church.”

Thus was a Catholic conversion presented, in the words of Pavone, as the “full flowering” of an evangelical one. The release made no mention of Vinzant, but noted that a priest in Dallas named Edward Robinson would ready Norma for her confirmation.

FATHER ROBINSON HAD joined the Dominican order in 1935 in his native Minnesota. Having come to Dallas in 1966, he had begun serving its diocese as a pro-life coordinator the year after the Roe ruling. That he would ready Jane Roe for the Catholic faith seemed the culmination of his eighty-four years, and he began meeting Monday nights with Norma and Connie in the same priory where they had attended Mass with Vinzant.

Norma asked Robinson many questions—about the catacombs in Rome, the upside-down crucifixion of St. Peter. The priest gave Norma answers and, on August 10, he took her confession, reading I Am Roe in preparation. As Norma told the Catholic News Service: “Father said he was going to use my book as my confession, so I was brief.”

One week later, Norma sat before Fathers Robinson and Pavone at her parish in Dallas. She wore a long blue shift with white flowers and a shawl of light blue lace, the latter a gift from a pro-life advocate named Lynn Mills. Norma had met Mills in Chicago at a trial of the pro-life activist Joseph Scheidler. Mills had become her “sponsor” and sat now beside her rubbing her back. Connie sat rows behind.

The two priests, one with black hair, one white, wore matching vestments and divided the service between them, one placing his fingers wet with chrism upon Norma’s forehead, the other placing a wafer in her mouth. The wafer signified the body of Christ, and Pavone told Norma that it contained all of humanity, among it “all the babies that were lost . . . the babies that didn’t get a chance to play in the playgrounds. He has given them back to you now in His flesh.”

As Pavone spoke, Norma cried. But she was not thinking of the 37 million legal abortions in America in the quarter-century since Roe. She was moved by the thought of connecting with children lost to adoption, not abortion, the three girls she herself had let go. “It was,” she soon recounted, “like having my own children come back to me all at one time. It was like seeing all their faces, even though I’ve never known them.”

Norma did, of course, know her eldest. Owing to the mistake of a nurse, she had momentarily held her second child, too. But the absence of her third child, she whose conception had most changed her life, had taken a particular toll on Norma; way back in 1981, she had told a journalist that “abandoning” her had filled her with guilt, and that she wondered about her “all the time.” Added Norma: “I don’t think I could handle loving this child.”