Frankly, America needs a new front in the abortion debate right now like a hole in the head. But that’s exactly what the documentary AKA Jane Roe seems intended to inflict. It premieres on Friday night.
Norma McCorvey is the “Roe” named in the landmark US Supreme Court case – Roe v. Wade – that made abortions legal. This documentary chronicles her infamous Saul of Tarsus-like conversion from pro-choice to pro-life, as well as her decades-long crusade against the abortions her case made legal.
It then throws in this … twist (which no media outlet is even bothering to signal as a spoiler alert):
McCorvey turns to the camera with an oxygen tube dangling from her nose and tells director Nick Sweeney,
‘This is my deathbed confession. I took their money and they put me out in front of the camera and told me what to say, and that’s what I’d say.’
‘It was all an act?’ the director asks. ‘Yeah,’ she says. I was good at it, too.’
(The Washington Post, May 20, 2020)
We are led to believe that McCorvey died as dramatically as she lived; specifically, just 10 minutes after that remarkable deathbed confession in 2017.
But, no matter your views on abortion, I trust we can all feel sympathy for this hopelessly misguided woman. Except that I’m sure the self-righteous Christians who praised her in life are now damning her soul to the pits of Hell.
More to the point, though, McCorvey was sorely mistaken if she thought pro-choice activists would celebrate her for swindling their pro-life adversaries so spectacularly. After all, not since Judas took thirty pieces of silver to betray Jesus has a person betrayed so much (a woman’s fundamental right to choose an abortion) for so little ($500,000).
Indeed, whether she believed in God or not, I hope she found time amidst her political confessions to redeem her craven soul. Mind you, if McCorvey had a genuine conversion, I would have no comment. But this is friggin’ unbelievable!
Finally, you’ve probably heard legal punditry about conservatives stacking the courts to make abortions illegal again. But, trust me, one need only recall Prohibition crusades to know how newfangled abortion crusades would inevitably play out.
[Note: The irony of ironies is that McCorvey herself never had an abortion. Because, by the time the court ruled for her on behalf of all women, she had already been forced to have her child. She gave it up for adoption, which many women did with automaton ease back then.]