The Supreme Court reportedly has received more mail—45,000 letters at last count—on the abortion decision than any case it had ever handed down. In a New York Times Magazine interview with John Jenkins, Blackmun said, “Think of any name; I’ve been called it in those letters: Butcher of Dachau, murderer, Pontius Pilate, Adolf Hitler.” Much of the mail is rumored to be in Blackmun’s office. Also rumored to have ended in the wake of the abortion decision was any semblance of friendship between Blackmun and Burger.
For years after the decision, when he spoke in public Blackmun was booed and picketed by antiabortionists. Threats were made against his life. However, in private and public conversations, most recently in a 1987 public television interview, he has stated that he still stands behind the abortion decision and in fact considers it essential to protect women’s equality.
A few years ago, while speaking at a small southern college, Blackmun was startled when a woman in the audience ran down an aisle and onto the stage, whereupon she swept up Justice Blackmun in a bear hug and said: “I can never thank you enough for what you have done for women.” The woman was Mary Doe.
Norma McCorvey still lives in Dallas. She has held many different jobs and as of this writing works as an apartment house manager. McCorvey was ambivalent for many years about revealing her role as Jane Roe, sometimes giving interviews, at other times declining to do so. In recent years she has given several interviews to popular magazines and has permitted photographs of herself. She declined to be interviewed for this book unless she was paid. On September 9, 1987, seventeen years after she became the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, Norma McCorvey revealed in an interview with columnist Carl Rowan that she had not, in fact, been raped. In 1989, McCorvey announced in a newspaper interview that she was gay. Coming out, never an easy decision for a public figure, especially one tied to such a hot political issue as abortion, proved to be a good move, McCorvey says, something that has made her more at ease with herself and her life.
In the mid-1990s, in a great flurry of excitement, the anti-choice forces announced a strategic coup: Norma McCorvey had changed her mind about abortion. This was something the pro-choice forces had always feared might happen. They had rarely used McCorvey as a spokeswoman, in fact, because they felt she was too emotionally fragile and also because they worried that she would become a target for anti-abortion violence. (McCorvey received hate mail over the years, and in 1989, the night before she was to leave for a major pro-choice march in Washington, D.C., gunshots were fired through the front door of her house in the middle of the night.) After the announcement, McCorvey gave several television interviews, where it quickly became apparent that she was not so firmly or totally opposed to abortion as to be of any real help to the anti-choice forces. The story quickly faded from the news. Today, McCorvey lives quiedy in Dallas, Texas, and works as a cleaning and building maintenance woman. As she herself likes to say, she is perhaps “the most famous cleaning woman in America.”
Mary and John Doe became lawyers. They have two children, and they live and work in a southern city.
Linda Coffee still lives in Dallas and practices corporate law at the same law firm she joined after she finished law school. Her fight to protect women’s abortion right did not end with Roe v. Wade. Shortly after the Supreme Court decision, she filed a class-action suit against a large metropolitan Dallas hospital that was not providing abortion services to all women who needed them.
Sarah Weddington also got a lot of vilifying hate mail. Most of it she threw away, but the more imaginative letters she kept. A popular public speaker, she was also booed and picketed for several years when she spoke in public. While serving her third term in the Texas state legislature, she was offered and accepted a job as general counsel to the Department of Agriculture. She moved to Washington D.C., in late 1978. When Midge Constanza, special assistant to the president on women’s issues, left in a flurry of controversy after she found Presidentjimmy Carter less supportive than he had pledged to be on women’s rights, Weddington was tapped as her successor. She accepted, even though President Carter opposed using public monies to fund abortions. Anti-choice, pro-choice, and feminist groups opposed her appointment.
At the White House, though, her résumé no longer mentioned that she had argued Roe v. Wade. It said only she had successfully argued a Supreme Court case. In a magazine interview given at that time, she said that she and the president had agreed to disagree on abortion (Carter opposed the public funding of abortions), noting that he had told her she must abide by his decision when she took the job, and she had agreed to do so. When Carter lost his bid for re-election, Weddington took a job in Washington as a lobbyist for the state of Texas. She left that job in 1986 and returned to Austin to work in her own law practice. Today Weddington spends much of her time on the lecture circuit, speaking about women’s reproductive rights.
Roy Lucas no longer practices law. He sold maritime art for a while and as of this writing is an art student. He was divorced from Uta Landy, his first wife, married two more times, and is presently single.
Ron Weddington, who was divorced from Sarah Weddington, remarried. He still lives and practices law in Austin.
James Clark received a lot of hate mail while he was serving in the legislature. It died out when he returned to private life. He still lives in Dallas with his second wife, the former Carolyn Tobian, whom he met when they were both working in the reform movement.
Jimmye Kimmey, the executive director of ASA who organized the amicus curiae briefs, became an Episcopalian priest. She lives in New York City.
Only one of the movers and shakers in the abortion movement has changed his mind about abortion. New York obstetrician Bernard Nathanson, an active participant in NOW and director of one of New York’s biggest clinics after the repeal law passed, became a spokesperson for the antiabortionists in the early 1980s. In 1986 he was instrumental in the release and publicity of an inflammatory and misleading antiabortion film entitled The Silent Scream.
Virginia Whitehill and her small band of reformers who did so much to change women’s lives disbanded their group shortly after the decision. They had finally wearied of the hate mail and the angry, anonymous phone calls. The women continue to work in many areas to improve women’s lives but still do not call themselves feminists.