Norma McCorvey, the woman at the center of the US Supreme Court ruling on abortion, testifies before a US Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee during hearings on the 25th anniversary of Roe v. Wade on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. (Getty)
Norma McCorvey, later known as Jane Roe in the landmark 1971 U.S. Supreme Court abortion decision, died February 18 in Katy, Texas. She was 69-years old and she died of a heart ailment, the Washington Post reported.
It was reported days before her death that McCorvey was battling a serious case of pneumonia.
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She gave birth to three children in her lifetime, all of which were given up for adoption.
When she was 21, McCorvey became pregnant for her third time, and her friends told her to falsely report to police that she had been raped so she could get a legal abortion in Texas due to an exception in the law. However, there was no such exception and she was forced to look for alternatives, including getting an illegal abortion. But she never followed through with the abortion due to being turned away by local authorities.
McCorvey was then referred to two attorneys that were seeking pregnant women in Texas who wanted an abortion in an effort to legally challenge the state law. After three years of proceedings, the case reached the Supreme Court. During that span, she gave birth to the child, who she ended giving up for adoption.
McCorvey was given the name “Jane Roe” in the Supreme Court case as the plaintiff and later revealed her real name and told the press that she had sought to get an abortion because she was suffering from depression.
Years after the decision, McCorvey became a born-again Christian and changed her stance on the Supreme Court decision. She became an advocate for the pro-life cause.