Chapter 27

“Emily’s invitation to church.”

“Babies in the freezer.”

“100% Pro life.”

Norma wrote out her talking points on orange index cards, her journey from choice to life distilled to a dozen or so steps. The cards had helped Norma on her lecture tours. But they stopped short of her conversion to Catholicism. And having just given her the sacrament of confirmation, Father Pavone set out to help her sell the addendum to her story, Priests for Life quickly publishing a booklet titled “My Journey into the Catholic Church.”

To narrativize Norma’s conversion was, of course, to lay claim to it. And every photo of Norma in the booklet included Pavone. It Catholicized Norma’s roots, too; whereas the priest had recently acknowledged that Norma was “unsure of the details of her religious background,” the booklet asserted that her mother was Catholic and had often dropped the young Norma off at Mass. “I liked it so much and was often moved to tears,” Norma attested. “I felt the presence of God.”

The narrative of Norma thus continued to evolve, and she began to criticize the evangelicals’ tactics. “The Catholics are nonviolent,” she told a reporter, this fall of 1998. “There is no storming into an abortion mill or chaining people to staircases. You accomplish nothing, and some say Operation Rescue set the movement back twenty years.”

Evangelicals took note. There was a sense among them, says Rob Schenck, the reverend whose ministry had brought Norma to DC, “that we had lost a prize and she was now on somebody else’s mantel.” He adds: “We all knew that we were competing for basically the same donor pool. And one way you did was grabbing people like Norma and saying, she’s with me—and not with you anymore.”

Norma had helped Schenck’s bottom line; inserting photos of her into his ministry newsletter had roughly doubled donations, he says. But Pavone’s booklet, eleven glossy pages, was a fundraising tool of a different order. “It would be extremely valuable as a premium,” says Schenck. “If somebody made a contribution they would get that booklet . . . along with a second ask.”

Of course, the new Norma also lost a few speaking gigs. (One Baptist pastor wrote that Norma was now “condemned before God.”) Catholics and Protestants had sparred for centuries over everything from sacraments to saints, and their antipathies sometimes still simmered. The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, for example, would soon tell Larry King that “as an evangelical, I believe that the Roman church is a false church and it teaches a false gospel.” But Catholics and evangelicals were united on abortion. The pro-life movement was “as close to an ecumenical movement as American history has seen,” one history put it. Norma remained in demand in both communities, and departed in September on a two-month speaking tour of fourteen states. She was preparing for a dinner at a crisis pregnancy center in South Carolina when her agent spelled out the twofold purpose of their every event: “Glorify God in all we do. Raise lots of money.”

Norma was paid about $800 per talk, money she divided with her ministry. And, having long cashed her checks at 7-Eleven, Norma struggled to hold onto what little she earned. “She was destitute financially,” says her accountant, Ron Allen. “She made $20,000 or $30,000 a year. As far as I know she lived hand-to-mouth.”

The Catholicization of Jane Roe had, however, done wonders for Pavone. Since confirming Norma, he had seen donations to Priests for Life jump. Within two years, they would more than quadruple, from $1.3 million to $5.3 million.

NORMA CRAVED PUBLICITY, but had little appreciation for those who helped her get it. As she emailed her new speaking agent in July: “NO ONE WILL ‘CONTROL’ ME.”

Anything could set Norma off—a check not yet received, a letter opened on her behalf. Her speaking agent, Bill Hampton, was soon exasperated. “We never know when you are going to get upset with us,” he wrote to her. That Norma would move on was inevitable and, in 1999, she did, entrusting her travel and booking to a speaking firm in Nashville.

Still, Priests for Life remained Norma’s bullhorn. Despite her volatility (and her Coronas and Marlboros), PFL did its best to spread her gospel. Pavone himself helped Norma to write her talks, and moderated some conversations with her. The conversion of Jane Roe remained a great testimony not only to the evil of abortion but to PFL. Her rebirth was a sacrament of sorts, an atonement, as her teacher Father Robinson told the press, “for any complicity she had in this abortion business.” He added: “She is perfectly at peace.”

Norma, however, was not at peace. Fifty-one years old, she had bound her life to an endless discussion of genocide and God. The anniversary of Roe had become a sort of macabre pro-life holiday—a day of prayer and fundraising and mourning and marching that every January drew many tens of thousands of Christians to the capital and left Norma, sure as her annual turn at the podium, depressed.

Her depression was clinical, said her doctor. And though it had preceded Roe, Roe played a part, the feeling that every year “another million deaths,” as a lawyer she met at the march put it, were on her head. So did the demands of the anniversary. “They were overscheduling her,” says Sheree Havlik, a friend from Operation Rescue. “She was not as strong as people thought.” Adds Havlik: “Every January, I was really pulling her out of the trenches.”

And yet, every January, Norma took to the podium alongside the pols and quarterbacks and clergy. Abortion was her living. After she gave a talk at the 1999 march that she titled “National Day of Death,” she flew around the country to give it again and again. By year’s end, she had been paid $25,000 and been mailed, at her Dallas P.O. box, hundreds of letters—invitations and rosaries and poems and forgiveness, Christians letting Norma know that Roe was not her fault, that God had chosen her because He knew that she would return to Him.

Norma read every note, tucking them away in her garage. They were kind but wearyingly earnest; a woman Norma had just met wrote that God had granted her a glimpse of Norma’s beauty. Norma found herself tiring of her fellow pro-lifers, those lily-white believers who spoke, said Norma, as she did not—“Lord Jesus Christ this, and Lord Jesus Christ that.” She called them the “little Christians.”

Norma remained her salty self. Sex in particular, the hint of it, still clung to her. She was often braless and bawdy, happy to present herself as a would-be Jezebel; she told the Reverend Schenck that were she looking for a man, “I’d put my hands on you.” The next January in DC, she stood beside her friend Karen Garnett, due in four months with her fifth child, and told any and all: “We’re pregnant.’ ”

Norma’s homosexuality, however, was no joke. In the five years since Schenck had brought her to Georgetown, donors and pastors, mindful that he had her ear, had phoned him, he says, with their concern that Connie remained a “shadow lesbian presence in her life.” Their worry was unsurprising. Opposition to homosexuality was as intense in their circle as opposition to abortion. Indeed, Benham had recently confessed to a professor of politics that he would support abortion to prevent the birth of a gay child. “Instead of building bridges to homosexuality,” he wrote that winter, “we need to be storming the gates of hell.”

His fellow pro-life advocates said much the same. Randall Terry decried the desire of “homosexuals and lesbians . . . to glorify their perversions.” Troy Newman feared the wrath that “abortion and homosexuality and other sins” would bring upon America. Frank Pavone lamented Norma’s previous “spell of lesbianism and bitterness.” And Schenck would both liken homosexuality to polygamy and call for a constitutional amendment to bar gay marriage.

Norma knew of their damnations. It was Benham and company who had led her to renounce her homosexuality as the profane folly of a woman desperate to avoid another pregnancy. And yet, these same men clamored for her company. “Nobody was going to cut her off, because she was too valuable,” says Schenck. “She was kind of a trophy.”

Back in the capital in 2000, at a Mass on the eve of the march, that trophy, recalls her pregnant friend Garnett, was feeling “anxious and claustrophobic.”

Norma was in the care of Pavone on this trip. The priest joined her on discussion panels and at breakfasts at the Hyatt. But Norma was tiring of him. Pavone was on the board of her ministry—and occasionally had Priests for Life donate a few hundred dollars to it. But Norma did more for him and his coffers than he did for her. “I was hoping that you would be more helpful and a friend,” she’d faxed Pavone only weeks before. “King Herods I have.”

Norma was thus open to finding herself a new keeper when, at a banquet hours after the march, a lawyer from Texas approached.

“I said,” recalls Allan Parker, “ ‘Miss Norma, I think you’re going to be involved in overturning Roe v. Wade someday.’ ”

ALLAN EDWARD PARKER JR. was born in Houston on the last day of summer in 1952. Four younger siblings had arrived when, in 1962, the family moved to the plains of Oklahoma. There, in the city of Duncan, Allan Sr. went to work for Halliburton, helping the oil giant ship sand and mud for the drilling of wells.

The Parkers were practicing Catholics, the children baptized, the sons altar boys at Assumption Catholic Church. Allan was spiritual; he loved the Latin Mass. He was physical, too—hiking and fishing, playing football and tennis and wrestling. But he was small. By ninth grade, he had left sports behind (save his job managing the wrestling team), turning instead to debate and books and a Catholic youth group.

Parker started college in 1970. He was an underclassman at the University of Oklahoma when his number for the Vietnam draft lottery came up: sixteen. He got the news while in Wyoming on a summer job cutting wheat, and thought of moving farther north to Canada. “I was kind of a hippie,” he says. “I had long hair.” But he had a girlfriend back home, and enjoyed school besides. So he returned to Oklahoma and enrolled in ROTC, committing to spend a few years with the army post-college in the hope that the war would then be over.

Parker majored in economics. But it was a course on the history of science that molded him, the knowledge in particular that “major scientific theories,” he says—from the phlogiston theory to spontaneous generation—“often turn out to be wrong.” Henceforth, he would be skeptical of science.

Parker was still in college when, in 1973, he married his girlfriend of two years, a Presbyterian named Susan. A daughter soon followed. In 1976, Parker finished up his stint on an army base in North Carolina and began law school.

Parker had taken the LSAT on a whim. The practical promise of law appealed to him, and he graduated from the University of Texas with high honors. But he studied at the expense of his marriage, he says, and Susan retreated into the Bible, becoming born again.

Parker was no more available to his wife when he became a corporate lawyer in Corpus Christi. Despite her pleadings, he refused marriage counseling. But in 1981, he consented to join her on a Catholic retreat devoted to marriage renewal. Parker was writing his thoughts about life and marriage during a session on communication when he found himself “alone with God,” he says, and submitted to Him, born again at the age of twenty-nine.

Parker and his wife left their Presbyterian church for what he termed “an evangelistic” Baptist one. Parker left his job, too, to teach education law and civil procedure at a Catholic university in San Antonio. In 1989, his university sent him to Strasbourg for a course on international human rights law.

Parker had never given abortion much thought. Back when Roe was decided, a few months before his marriage, his reaction to it had been “So what?” But now, in France with his wife and three daughters, he was assigned the pro-life position in a classroom debate. By the time he returned to Texas, his research had won him over, the lawyer swayed in particular by two facts—that various international pacts (including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) prohibited the execution of a pregnant woman, and that the American Convention on Human Rights—a union of Central and Southern American (and largely Catholic) countries—declared that life began at conception.

Parker became an evangelist, he says, wanting above all “to tell people about Jesus.” Back home, he took steps to activize his Christianity. He founded a branch of the Christian Coalition. He founded a local organization to mediate disputes between Christians. And in 1998, having left teaching to work full-time at the Texas Justice Foundation, a nonprofit he founded to legally defend school choice and school vouchers, he turned to abortion, helping a pair of young lawyers take aim at local clinics. The lawyers collected affidavits from eleven women who said that abortions had injured their uterus or colon. The case had not yet been settled (in their favor) when, in 1999, those same two lawyers connected Parker with a man named Harold Cassidy, a pro-life lawyer in New Jersey who was focused not on the physical toll of abortion but the emotional one.

Cassidy had litigated the famous Baby M adoption case, arguing a decade before that a would-be surrogate mother could only make an informed decision to surrender her child once she had delivered it. The New Jersey Supreme Court had agreed. Cassidy was readying now to file a suit that would enable him to argue against abortion on similar grounds.

That a woman is less likely to surrender a child after birth than before it is little surprise. The most vivid sonogram, the strongest fetal heartbeat, is no match for the wallop of an actual baby, let alone a baby one has birthed. So antithetical is adoption to most women that, as one study revealed, more than nine in ten who seek abortions too late in their pregnancies to get them go on to raise the child they had wanted to abort. Birth changes things. And Cassidy argued that in preventing birth, abortion denied a woman her right to a relationship with her child.

Cassidy was now representing a plaintiff who was a minor, and who claimed that she had been coerced by her parents into having an abortion.

The right to choose, of course, enables one to choose motherhood. And there had been, alas, great multitudes of women forced or coerced into having abortions—millions in China alone over the previous three decades. Those women had suffered. Cassidy’s client had too, she said.

Cassidy hoped to support his case with amicus briefs filed by the born again plaintiffs Jane Roe and Mary Doe. (The latter, a woman named Sandra Cano who was the plaintiff of Doe v. Bolton, had become pro-life like Norma.) Norma, of course, could not speak to the emotional consequences of abortion; she’d not had one. But she had been exploited by her lawyers, she said. Needing a lawyer to help Norma submit a brief, Cassidy asked Parker if he would represent her. Parker said he would, and Cassidy told Parker that he could meet Norma at the upcoming March for Life in January 2000.

Parker had read Norma’s second memoir, Won by Love, when he approached her at that DC banquet. He was prepared to help her submit that brief for Cassidy. But, as he now told Norma, he imagined that she might do something far more consequential—tackle Roe itself.

“He was talking about his whole vision,” says Norma’s friend Karen Garnett, who spoke to Parker the morning after he approached Norma. He wanted, she recalls, “to get a whole bunch of affidavits together to overturn Roe.”

The affidavits Parker intended to collect would be from women testifying that abortion had caused them emotional harm. Once he had collected them, he would introduce them to a court, thereby exposing, he later explained, “the lie that abortion is good for women.”

PRO-LIFE ADVOCATES HAD long maintained that abortion not only killed the fetus but did harm to those around it. It harmed the would-be fathers, “post-abortion men” guilt-ridden yet powerless. Most of all, it harmed the would-be mothers, women beset, they said, by breast cancer and a psychological condition that they named post-abortion syndrome.

In time, these diagnoses were widely dismissed, debunked. The conservative Weekly Standard, for example, labeled post-abortion survivor syndrome “crankery,” while the National Cancer Institute reported “no association between induced and spontaneous abortions and breast cancer risk.” But post-abortion syndrome—the idea, as Mother Teresa wrote, that every abortion killed not only a baby but a mother’s “conscience”—persisted in the public consciousness. Though the scientific community scoffed, Parker had learned in college just how often that community was wrong. He believed in PAS. Hitching himself to Norma, he would turn it into a legal weapon in the war on Roe.

A MARRIAGE COUNSELOR named Vincent Rue was the first to label and clinically define PAS.

Rue had been born in 1948 into a Catholic family in Los Angeles that soon numbered ten. His father was a marriage counselor who also taught at a local women’s college. “Psychologically and biologically, a woman is destined to be the chalice of life, by nature dependent on man,” James Rue told a gathering of Catholic psychologists in 1964. He added that educating women to become professionals put a strain on their marriages; they ought to be taught instead, he said, to be wives and mothers—“the true identity of womanhood.”

The son decided to become a marriage counselor, too, and began his master’s degree at Saint Louis University. There, in 1972, he presented a paper proposing that the federal government do something his father had advocated on a state level: create a Department of Marriage and the Family. “The DMF would coordinate existing but fragmented family services,” a subsequent article explained, “provide premarital, sexual, child-development and family-life education and counseling.” The department would also guard against “practices that are detrimental to marriage and the family.”

Rue’s proposal made no mention of abortion. But one of his advisers at the university was a pro-life activist named William Brennan, who was writing a book titled The Abortion Holocaust: Today’s Final Solution. Another mentor, a priest named Paul Marx, was also active in the fight against abortion. He had just written a book titled The Death Peddlers: War on the Unborn, and had spearheaded the use of fetal photography as a pro-life tool. Two years earlier, while a senior at Saint John’s University in Minnesota, Rue had helped Marx research the growing push to legalize abortion. The two had concluded, says Rue, that proponents of legal abortion were exaggerating the number of women killed by illegal abortion. Says Rue: “There was a lot of so-called science that wasn’t scientific.”

Abortion was legal when Rue, by then a doctoral student in family relations at the School of Home Economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, began to help a professor assess its impact on women. Focusing on a local problem-pregnancy counseling service, they determined, says Rue, that “abortion counseling was a kind of myth.” Rue returned to California in 1975 to practice alongside his father, and began to ask every female client if she’d ever been pregnant. “If they brought up abortion,” says Rue, “they’d burst into tears.”

Rue had been a therapist for six years when an acquaintance from graduate school arranged for him to testify to Congress about the psychological toll of abortion. Rue decided to give it a name: post-abortion syndrome. In November 1981, he listed for Congress twenty-four of its effects, from depression and anger to infertility and psychosis. Rue described PAS in much the same terms that psychiatrists described post-traumatic stress. Says Rue: “It’s a type of PTSD.”

The next year, Rue spoke at a convention of the National Right to Life Committee. In his audience was a woman named Olivia Gans, who went on to help found an organization called Women Exploited by Abortion. Its members began to share stories of PAS. And in 1987, an engineer turned activist named David Reardon published Aborted Women, Silent No More. The book resonated with the pro-life movement, and the year it was published, leaders of the National Right to Life Committee spoke of PAS to President Reagan.

Gary Bauer, a senior Reagan advisor, suggested to the president that his Surgeon General write up a report on the purported syndrome; if morality had not succeeded in outlawing abortion, perhaps public health could. Reagan authorized the inquiry, and Dr. Koop reviewed the literature. In time, however, the doctor declined to write a report, explaining in a 1989 letter to Reagan that the 250-odd studies he had reviewed on abortion and mental health were “flawed methodologically.” He concluded that “the data do not support the premise that abortion does nor does not cause or contribute to psychological problems.”

Pro-life advocates were angry; they felt that the pro-life Dr. Koop had betrayed the cause. “He’s afraid to apply his own views and values,” the chairman of the Conservative Caucus, a lobbying group, told the press. The doctor responded on Good Morning, America that he had “always been able to separate my personal beliefs from my responsibilities as Surgeon General.”

The American Psychological Association entered the fray, appointing a panel to glean what it could about PAS from the existing literature. In 1990, the panel reported that instances of psychological distress following abortion were “relatively rare.” One study, for example, revealed that women were four and a half times more likely to express relief than guilt over an abortion performed in the first trimester (when more than 90 percent of abortions are performed).

Subsequent studies would indicate much the same. The Turnaway Study, a longitudinal study of a thousand women who sought to end their pregnancies, would find, in the words of its principal investigator, “no link between receiving an abortion and subsequent adverse mental health outcomes.” Added the future president of the American Psychiatric Association in a 1992 article: “There is no evidence of an Abortion-Trauma syndrome.”

That wasn’t to say that abortion wasn’t something fundamentally grave. “Abortion is a right that ends in sorrow, not celebration,” wrote Sarah Blustain, a proponent of choice. It wasn’t to say that there weren’t women harmed by abortion. This abortion providers knew. The conscientious among them, people like Curtis Boyd and Charlotte Taft, used screening and counseling to flag uncertainty and prevent regret. Still, one cannot fully predict the aftershocks of any decision. Sorrowful stories of abortion were a staple of the annual March for Life, jeremiads the poet Gwendolyn Brooks had evoked years before in a midcentury poem. Wrote Brooks: “Abortions will not let you forget.”

The question, then, was not whether an abortion could cause a woman grief. It was, rather, one of prevalence, of scope, a point Dr. Koop had stressed while testifying to Congress in 1989. Yes, he said, he had seen abortion take an “overwhelming” psychological toll on an individual. But from a public health perspective, that toll was “minuscule.” Indeed, a 1992 study cited in the American Psychologist would show that abortion has no greater impact on mental health than other, ordinary stresses, such as pregnancy or birth—let alone the birth of an unwanted child.

That same year, the Supreme Court ruled in Casey that restrictions on abortion that did not unduly burden women were legal. Among the restrictions it upheld was a Pennsylvania law that—contrary to medical consensus—required doctors to warn women of the “possible detrimental psychological effects of abortion.” By 1999, “informed consent” laws were on the books in thirteen states.

If the medical community had discredited PAS, its very diagnosis was for some women a comfort. There is relief in pinpointing the source of any problem. “You can’t repent depressive symptoms,” a psychology professor named Brenda Major told the journalist Emily Bazelon. “But you can repent an action.” A cluster of religious organizations began to fund retreats for “post-abortive women” that fingered PAS as the root cause of their emotional hurt. Priests for Life was among them, and Father Pavone soon had Norma attend one. “I am so scared but, hopefully I will live,” she emailed a friend. “I do not consider myself post abortive.”

Allan Parker, however, did. And as he prepared, in early 2000, to use Norma to challenge Roe, he wished for her to put in writing the ways in which abortion had harmed her.

On February 14, just weeks after meeting Norma in DC, Parker arrived at her Dallas home.

NORMA WAS HAPPY for the visit. She had begun to look past Pavone. And in her four-plus years with the pro-life movement, she had had little to do with its legal flank, working instead with entities rooted in direct action and counseling and politics. Alongside Parker, Norma would now be able to fight Roe with the law.

Parker arrived on Cactus Lane with a tape recorder and three lawyers. The group hoped to interview Norma so as to prepare her affidavit for the abortion case in New Jersey. After introductions and readings from the Bible and small talk—how great it would be to convert Oprah, someone said—Norma told a life story that had little truth in it, from her claim that she had lived as a young hippie beside an oak tree in Lee Park to her familiar lie that she had helped doctors to perform abortions. “The women,” said Norma, “were digging their nails into me in an effort to endure the pain.”

Talk turned to the affidavit Norma had signed thirty years before. “I am particularly interested in the lies,” Kathleen Cassidy Goodman told her. She asked Norma if she had any evidence or memories “to support calling Sarah Weddington a liar.”

Norma did not, and Goodman moved on in search of something incriminating. “Did you ever do drugs with Weddington?” Norma answered that she wished she had. “Me too,” allowed Goodman.

Norma, though, came through; she told the lawyers that Weddington and Coffee had drunk with her “a couple of pitchers of beer” when first they met. She said that when her lawyers had her sign her affidavit, she had not known the meaning of the word “abortion.” She said that they had not explained that abortion ended a fetal life.

None of this was true, not the implication that the lawyers had unsteadied Norma with alcohol nor the assertion that she had not known the intent of her lawsuit. Norma had been unequivocal about wanting an abortion, and had known the meaning of the word. If the lawyers had misled Norma at all, it was in not extinguishing her hope that she might be able to both file suit and end her pregnancy.

Parker had gotten what he wanted. The affidavit Norma would sign a month and a day later would assert not only that Roe was “built upon false assumptions” but that its plaintiff had been “exploited by two self-interested attorneys.”

Parker also was an attorney with interests. But he asserted that those interests came from on high. “God is going to overturn Roe v. Wade,” he told Norma. “God is going to anoint us. God is going to work for us, through us, to do His work.”

One month later, Norma stood with Parker at the National Press Club in DC to announce the submission of her affidavit on behalf of Donna Santa Marie, the pseudonymous plaintiff in New Jersey represented by Cassidy.

Norma knew the drill. She had stood by as Allred and Benham and Pavone spoke to the press in her name. And she was quiet as Parker did the same, trumpeting her affidavit, untruths signed and notarized. The lawyer then released a second document which declared in her name that “the most important relationship that a woman can ever have” is the relationship with her child.

It was, at best, an ironic statement coming from Norma. It continued, asserting that, unlike abortion, adoption “at least gives the mother the hope that her child is alive and able to pursue happiness.”

That very hope, however, torments many women. As Virginia Whitehill, a board member of Planned Parenthood in Texas, observed, adoption was “even more painful than an illegal abortion” because whereas the angst of abortion “healed eventually, the suffering over having given up a child went on forever.” Indeed, only months before, a study of six hundred women who’d relinquished children to adoption had found them “at risk for long-term physical, psychologic, and social repercussions.” This Norma understood. “We’re not animals,” she told the journalist Monika Maeckle back in 1981. “We can’t just have a litter and walk away.” Yet Norma had walked away three times.

After the press conference, Parker submitted Norma’s brief to a New Jersey court. He also issued a public call to women to submit their abortion stories to his website for his affidavit-collecting project, disseminating an instruction sheet with suggestions of what those women might have endured, from coercion to physical pain.

Parker then formed a branch of his foundation to find those women. He called it Operation Outcry. “The plan,” Parker’s colleague Goodman said, “is to present one million names.” Norma McCorvey was the first.

Of course, Norma had not had an abortion. But Parker had her speak of PAS everywhere from Florida to London. Her appearances raised money and helped produce nearly four hundred affidavits, which the lawyer then submitted to the court in the case that Cassidy had brought, Marie v. Whitman.

The affidavits testified that abortion had caused the women lifelong trauma. “For a long time inability to hold or be near babies,” wrote a woman named Shirley, who had had two abortions. “Severe depression,” wrote another named Wendy, “especially in January, knowing my child would be another year older.” They were searing testimonies, testimonies intended to change the law.

PARKER SPOKE OFTEN of God. If the law was his métier, God was his master. And the lawyer told of the catastrophes God would bring if Roe remained law: natural disaster, terror attack, financial collapse. As Parker later wrote: “It is my duty as a watchman on the wall (Ezekiel 33:6) to warn you and others of the coming judgment upon America.”

Like Benham and Pavone before him, Parker also testified that God Himself had directed him to work with Norma. Having found a scriptural basis for the collection of his affidavits—verses from Isaiah about the sweeping away of lies—the lawyer told that he had been in the Dallas airport, on his way home from meeting Norma, when God planted in him that passage along with the idea to work with her.

The first sentence of Parker’s bio now attested that Norma was in his legal care. And though Pavone maintained his ties to Norma—introducing her at a 2001 benefit at the Waldorf, having his organization book her travel and talks at the start of 2002—Norma was with Parker now. In June 2002, she was the keynote speaker at a Justice Foundation dinner that attracted sponsors from Regal Cinemas to Taco Bell and raised money for the continued collection of affidavits.

The submission of affidavits, however, did nothing to help the plaintiff known as Donna Santa Marie. A New Jersey district court dismissed her case, and the Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal on Christmas Eve. Parker was undeterred. The centerpiece of his work remained Norma. And courts of law were capable of miracles; the Supreme Court had only just ruled that his fellow evangelical George W. Bush would become president. And so, in 2003, Parker reintroduced Norma—and Roe—to the courts.

ROE WAS JUST WEEKS OLD WHEN, in February 1973, John Hill, the newly elected attorney general of Texas, and others, requested that the Supreme Court rehear it. The Court denied their requests. But now, thirty years later, Parker hoped it might reconsider.

Deep within the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure lie the preconditions of a do-over, an opportunity for a litigant to have the federal courts “relieve” a prior decision. The court may do so, states Rule 60(b)(5), when “applying [the decision] prospectively is no longer equitable.” As Parker, a former professor of civil procedure, later explained: “You have to show that changes in legal and factual conditions make it no longer just . . . to give the decision future application.”

Parker wished to apply Rule 60 to Roe. Specifically, he wished to argue that, three decades after its passage, three changed conditions now rendered Roe unjust.

The first was a change in law. Only months before, Texas had signed a bill which made it legal to surrender to the state a baby at birth. As Parker put it: “A woman now has a feminist right to be separated from her child.” Similar “Baby Moses” laws were beginning to pass around the country, and Parker reasoned that they represented a humane alternative to abortion, and thus argued for its legal end.

Parker contended that two additional factual changes argued for vacating the decision in Roe. One was that, in the decades since the ruling, science had come to definitively prove that human life begins at fertilization. The other was that his pool of affidavits demonstrated that abortion was a source of trauma for women, not relief.

Of course, neither of these alleged changes could be called fact. They were the contentions of a pro-life advocate. But Rule 60 offered Parker a way forward. On June 17, 2003, he and Norma announced to a group of reporters in Dallas that they were filing a motion to have Roe reheard.

The name of their case was McCorvey v. Hill—William Hill was the Dallas County DA—and it argued that Norma’s affidavit in Roe was fraudulent. Pro-lifers were titillated. As Pat Buchanan wrote: “What if Roe v. Wade was based on fraud, deceit and lies?”

It wasn’t. (The only lie in Norma’s 1970 affidavit was the claim that she’d wanted an abortion for reasons other than simply not wanting a child.) Indeed, as Norma later made clear, if there was a dubious affidavit, it was her new one, signed and notarized six days before.

Some of the affidavit’s untruths were trifles: that Norma’s second child had been raised by its father, that Norma’s childhood imaginary friend Janie had inspired her pseudonym. Others were not. Norma asserted falsely that she had helped to take patients’ blood pressure, and then held their hands as they endured painful abortions, in fetid and filthy clinics. (Both Benham and Pavone later acknowledged they knew this to be untrue. Parker insists that Norma’s declarations about her role in the clinics was true, despite contemporaneous accounts to the contrary.) Then there was the lie at the heart of the affidavit, that Norma had not known the meaning of abortion when a pair of unscrupulous lawyers had turned her into Jane Roe.

Truth, however, was beside the point. (Parker’s press release declared that “the link between abortion and breast cancer is now known.”) What mattered to Parker was reopening Roe. Toward that end, he now submitted, along with Norma’s brief, a thousand or so affidavits from women attesting that they had been hurt by abortion.

PARKER WAS NOT the first to try and sway a panel of judges with personal stories of abortion. Back in 1989, for example, in an amicus brief filed to the Supreme Court in Webster, nearly three thousand women had written of their abortions in the service of choice. The pro-choice used private disclosures to try and sway public opinion, too—from the 1972 debut issue of Ms. magazine, which included the names of fifty-three women who had had abortions, to the 2003 website “I’m Not Sorry,” created coincidentally as Parker readied his case.

Research indicates that personal testimonies do influence opinion. Just one in four people, a study would show, react negatively when a woman confides she has had an abortion; a sizeable majority “respond with support and sympathy.”

And yet, only the tiniest percentage of the 42 million legal abortions performed in the three decades since Roe had been talked about publicly. Fewer still had been seen; years later, a journalist would reflect that the only photo of an abortion she had ever seen was in the 1976 book Our Bodies, Ourselves. The stigma of abortion had only grown, a stigma so intense that in January 2003, NARAL, an organization devoted to its defense, dropped the word from its name.

Months later, Parker filed his suit. The pro-choice all but ignored it. NARAL president Kate Michelman called it a “sad anti-choice publicity stunt.” The movement filed not a single brief defending Roe—a “stunning non-response,” wrote Lynn Paltrow, a leading advocate for reproductive rights. Added Paltrow: “The pro-choice movement failed to appreciate how serious and strategic anti-choice activists are when they bring cases unlikely to win in the short term.”

The court dismissed Parker’s suit after just two days, on grounds that too much time had passed for Roe to be reopened. The Supreme Court decision, wrote judge David Godbey, “was certainly final in this litigation.”

Parker appealed. Yes, years had passed since Roe. But, as one Harvard law professor noted, “the implication was that the period of delay corresponded to a period of traumatic repression.” While waiting for the federal appeals court in New Orleans to rule, Parker sent his client abroad—to England and Ireland and Canada and Uruguay—to talk up both her case and his affidavits. The narrative of Norma now climaxed not, as before, in a plaintiffship or a baptism or a confirmation, but in the consecrated vision of a lawyer.

Not that Norma was at peace with Parker. Her case had made the lawyer someone of note in the pro-life world; Pat Buchanan compared him to Thurgood Marshall, a Christian TV network hired him to host a program called Faces of Abortion, and conservative power brokers from Dick and Betsy DeVos to the Covenant Foundation funded him. As with so many of her previous collaborators, Norma felt that Parker got more than he gave. She emailed him angry notes that he was a “user” who would no longer be her “mouth-peace.” But always, after her outbursts, Norma cooled and the lawyer spoke for her again, asserting that his client was a vessel of God who wished only to overturn Roe.

THE PRO-LIFE HAD welcomed Norma with the promise that they cared for Norma, not just Jane Roe. As Robert Cooley, a pro-life activist in Connecticut, wrote to Benham two days after her baptism, it was “vital to be more jealous for her spiritual well being than for her public relations value to the movement.” Nearly a decade later, there were indeed those who wanted nothing but her well-being. Karen Garnett, who’d accompanied Norma to DC while pregnant with her fifth child, saw to it that a Catholic pro-life group gave her a stipend of $500 a month. Father Robinson (who’d recommended that Garnett do so), buffered Norma with weekly Masses and daily notes, offering up to her unceasing prayer and pardon.

Norma was thankful. She sent the old priest poinsettias and bird food, updates on her ministry and health. Still, Robinson and Garnett were less friends than exemplars. When Norma needed to talk, she often turned, if not to Connie, then to Daniel Vinzant, the former Baptist pastor who’d helped bring her into the Catholic church.

Vinzant had become Catholic two days before Norma. His conversion had exacted a price; he soon lost his pulpit and then his wife. The shame of impending divorce forced Vinzant from his beloved Waco. He had moved to Dallas, in January 2000, with his two teenage sons, when back home, on October 14, a car crash killed his daughter.

Jesus was a comfort to Vinzant in his grief. So was Norma. She set in his daughter’s casket, he recalls, “a little clutch purse filled with a rosary and a lipstick.” She, alone among his friends, left unchallenged his contention that while he would soon be civilly divorced, he remained religiously married. And she and Connie invited Vinzant and his sons for Thanksgiving—and most of the holidays after that, too. “She was alone. We were alone,” says Vinzant. “I was always comfortable with Norma and Connie because I was never judged.”

In turn, Vinzant didn’t judge Norma. “I just loved,” he says. He had come to see that life could be lived in more than one way. In the coming years, he and Norma would share a hundred or more Sundays, passing them at Mass and at an Olive Garden and in his used Nissan singing along with Creedence and Chicago and the Eagles. They talked too. Says Vinzant: “pure gossip.”

IN SEPTEMBER 2004, the federal appeals court in New Orleans affirmed the dismissal of McCorvey v. Hill. Its three judges agreed that too much time had passed to reopen Roe. But one of them, a Reagan appointee named Edith Jones, lamented that fact, writing of Roe’s “perverse result” and of her hope that the Supreme Court would revisit it. “Although McCorvey has no ‘live’ legal controversy,” she wrote, “the serious and substantial evidence she offered could have generated an important debate over factual premises that underlay Roe.”

Foremost among that evidence, wrote Jones, were Parker’s affidavits, testimony to the potential long-lasting psychological toll of abortion. Parker was desperate to introduce those affidavits to the Supreme Court. And in January 2005, he and Norma stood on the dais at yet another March for Life with news to share. Nellie Gray, who had founded the march in 1974, on the first anniversary of Roe, walked to the lectern to introduce them.

Gray was eighty, a little woman with a large pouf of dyed brown hair over her forehead. She had been born in Texas in 1924, and become a committed Catholic at eighteen. She had first learned of abortion in the pages of The Cardinal, a 1950 novel in which a doctor decides to let a woman die in delivery rather than abort her child with a craniotomy. In Gray’s memory, however, the baby died, and she soon opposed abortion absolutely; “No exceptions, no compromise,” she said. After Roe became law, Gray, who was single and had no children, left her job as a lawyer in the Department of Labor to fight abortion full-time. Thirty-two years later, her annual march anchored the fight on Roe. She turned to Norma and her lawyer.

“They are trying to overturn [Roe],” said Gray, wrapped in a blood-red scarf and shearling. “This is Ms. Norma! Ms. Norma McCorvey of Roe v. Wade!”

Norma stepped to the microphone and told her audience that only one week before, her lawyer had petitioned the Court to hear her case. Standing to her right, Parker clapped wildly.

One month later, however, the Supreme Court denied certiorari; Roe would remain the law.

Parker was undeterred. The feminist poet Muriel Rukeyser famously wrote that “if one woman told the truth about her life . . . the world would split open.” And Parker saw what few others did—that his affidavits could yet provide the legal means, as the activist David Reardon wrote, to “change the abortion debate so that we are arguing with our opponents on their own turf, on the issue of defending the interests of women.”

Months later, Congress cited Parker’s affidavits as evidence about PAS in a report on House Bill 1233, a proposed ban on abortions in South Dakota. When abortion returned to the Supreme Court with the 2007 case of Gonzales v. Carhart, a case concerning a federal ban against a method of late-term abortion, the justice at its center cited PAS in his decision.

“While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in explaining why the Court had upheld that abortion ban by a 5–4 vote, “it seems unexceptionable to conclude that some women come to regret their choice to abort. . . . Severe depression and loss of self-esteem can follow.”

It was a remarkable opinion. Ever since Roe, the pro-life argument against abortion had focused on the fetus. It had now shifted to the woman. Parker had helped to bring that shift about, and Justice Kennedy cited a Parker amicus brief in his opinion. In so doing, the justice legitimated both Parker and PAS as never before.

The court’s new rationale for banning abortion, wrote Linda Greenhouse in the New York Times, “was a development that stunned abortion rights advocates and that represents a major departure from how the court has framed the abortion issue for the past 34 years.” Added the Yale law professor Reva Siegel: “The [Operation] Outcry affidavits express the new rallying cry of the antiabortion movement.”

It was Norma whom Parker had designated the lead plaintiff of that operation, Norma he had ridden to the high court. Though her lingering torment owed not to abortion but to its unavailability, Norma now stood—for the second time—at the vanguard of a legal movement.

As the law professor Mary Ziegler later wrote: “Norma McCorvey is patient zero in this narrative—the first victim of abortion rights.”