Mildred Jefferson, shown here in 1947, was nineteen years old when, that January, she became the first black woman admitted to Harvard Medical School. The acceptance was national news.

(SCHLESINGER LIBRARY, RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY)

Mildred’s career as a surgeon was thwarted by racism and misogyny. Her dream dashed, she joined the pro-life movement in 1970, and quickly became a star. After Ronald Reagan, who had supported legal abortion as governor of California, heard Mildred in debate, he wrote to her, days before Roe, that she had “made it irrefutably clear that an abortion is the taking of human life.”

(RONALD REAGAN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY, PHOTOGRAPHER JACK KIGHTLINGER)

Curtis Boyd was born in 1937 into a fundamentalist Christian family on an East Texas farm. His grandmother encouraged him to preach, and he was ordained a minister at sixteen. He is shown here two years later, in 1955, upon his graduation from high school.

(THE ATHENIAN, ATHENS HIGH SCHOOL. COURTESY OF CURTIS BOYD)

Abortion was not yet legal when Boyd left family medicine to perform abortions full-time. After Roe, he became one of the leading abortion providers in the country. He helped to pioneer the standard method of second-trimester abortion, and—after the 2009 murder of his fellow abortion provider George Tiller—became the largest provider of third-trimester abortions in the country.

(ANDY LYMAN/NM POLITICAL REPORT)

Linda Coffee was a bankruptcy lawyer in Dallas when in 1970, she filed Roe v. Wade, contesting the Texas law against abortion. Her co-counsel, Sarah Weddington, hesitated to attach her name to the suit. “I think she was just cautious,” says Coffee. Coffee is shown here in 1972, eleven months before the Supreme Court ruling.

(BETTMAN/CONTRIBUTOR)

After Weddington argued Roe in the Supreme Court, Coffee was forgotten. Coffee had not seen her co-counsel in twenty-seven years when in 2019, the Texas branch of the National Women’s Political Caucus brought them together on an Austin dais, pictured here.

(RODOLFO GONZALEZ)

On March 3, 1970, Coffee paid fifteen dollars to file Roe v. Wade at the federal courthouse on North Ervay Street in Dallas. The lawyer saved her receipt, shown here.

(COURTESY OF LINDA COFFEE)

Norma was about to give birth when, on May 21, 1970, her lawyers filed an affidavit on her behalf, laying out the reasons for her suit. Among them was that the abortion providers Norma could afford were both illegal and dangerous, and that she considered “the decision of whether to bear a child a highly personal one.” Coffee kept the affidavit, the first page of which is shown here. A copy submitted to the court did not have Norma’s name.

(COURTESY OF LINDA COFFEE)

Norma McCorvey was born in 1947 in Simmesport, Louisiana, at the head of the Atchafalaya River. Before moving to Texas in 1950, she lived in the little house pictured here. It was up on piers to guard against flooding.

(COURTESY OF NORMA MCCORVEY)

Norma became the plaintiff Jane Roe in 1970. But she did not join the pro-choice community until 1981, when she went to a meeting of the National Organization for Women. Here she is, a decade later, at a conference in Oregon for reproductive rights.

(JOE WILKINS III)

Months after Norma gave birth, in 1970, to her third child, the Roe baby, she met her lifelong partner, Connie Gonzalez. The women are pictured here in 1994 at their Dallas home.

(TAMMYE NASH)

Norma had begun to turn her plaintiffship into a career when in 1989, the lawyer Gloria Allred met her at a rally in Washington, DC, and took her to Los Angeles. Pictured here are the handwritten drafts of speeches she gave before and after she became an evangelical Christian in 1995.

(SCHLESINGER LIBRARY, RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY)

Norma became Catholic in 1998. Five years later, she filed a petition to have Roe reversed. The 2003 case, McCorvey v. Hill, was dismissed. But one of its arguments—that abortion caused women psychological harm—helped to shift the pro-life focus from the fetus to the pregnant woman. To that end, Norma’s lawyer, Allan Parker, had begun collecting affidavits from women asserting that abortion harmed them. Norma provided the first. Though she’d not had an abortion, Norma thus became, as Professor Mary Ziegler later wrote, “patient zero in this narrative—the first victim of abortion rights.” Here she is, photographed by Annie Leibovitz in 1998, crucifix in hand.

(ANNIE LEIBOVITZ/TRUNK ARCHIVE)

Over and over again, Norma lied to the press, telling them, for example, that she had been raped, that she had been shot at because she was Jane Roe, that she had no money for food. She also declared herself uncompromisingly pro-life though, in truth, her views were not absolute. When she became a Christian in 1995, the New York Post put her on its front page.

(NEW YORK POST)

Norma had three daughters with three different men, and gave each child up for adoption. The sisters looked for one another and finally came together in Katy, Texas, on March 14, 2013. Melissa is seen here hugging Shelley the very moment they met. Hours later, the three sisters walked outside and crossed the street to a playground.

(JAHANGIR RAZMI)

Norma is seen here in Smithville, Texas, where she moved in 2009. Over the last years of her life, she increasingly detached herself from the pro-life movement and Roe too. She spoke openly of the toll her plaintiffship had taken, and reiterated what she had first stated publicly in 1973: that abortion ought to be legal through the first trimester of pregnancy.

(BOB DAEMMRICH/BOB DAEMMRICH PHOTOGRAPHY, INC.)