Roe v. Wade plaintiff Norma McCorvey dies

In the years to follow, McCorvey would struggle both to make ends meet and to define her role in the women’s rights movement.

McCorvey had been living at an assisted-living facility in Katy, Texas, at the time of her death, according to Joshua Prager, a journalist who profiled McCorvey in Vanity Fair in 2013 and is writing a forthcoming book on the subject. She eventually met attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, who wanted to challenge the Texas law.

She became a hero to abortion rights supporters but a villain to those seeking to outlaw abortion.

The opinion said states could not regulate abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy but could choose to impose some regulations after that.

Marjorie Dannenfelser – president of the Susan B Anthony List, an organization that seeks to roll back abortion rights – offered the group’s condolences in a statement and praised McCorvey’s shift in views. She became pregnant a second time and let the baby be adopted.

In the years after the ruling, McCorvey became an evangelical Christian and ardent anti-abortion advocate. However, the Supreme Court decision mandated that states can not make laws that outlaw abortion, as it violates the privacy of women.

She got to know the Rev. Philip Benham, Operation Rescue’s national director, during smoke breaks outside her office, and she accepted an invitation from the daughter of the group’s office manager to attend church.

“I apologize for signing the affidavit which brought the holocaust of abortion, ” she said. The justices are still divided ever so closely on Roe v. Wade. McCorvey stopped speaking publicly over the past three years, and in the past year or two her declining health prevented her from attending anti-abortion events.

Revealing her name in the 1980s, McCorvey later admitted that she hadn’t been raped – saying she had only said so in order to speed up her case.

She told the New York Times in 1994: “I don’t require that much in my life. That’s the one thing I never had”.

“I don’t believe in abortion even in an extreme situation”.