Norma Nelson, who grew up in Houston, was a precocious child who at the age of ten robbed a gas station and then ran away to Oklahoma City with a friend, where the two girls somehow managed to convince a hotel worker to let them rent a room. This little adventure came to an end when a maid caught her and her friend kissing and had the two arrested. It was the late 1950’s, things were fricking weird back then. Norma was declared a ward of the state and sent to a juvenile prison school, which was what she wanted in the first place. Her mother was a violent alcoholic, and her father was a TV repairman involved in a methodical disappearing act that culminated when she was thirteen. The nail in the coffin was when her parents decided to send her to a strict Catholic boarding school, which was apparently worse than the juvenile prison school because every time she was released Norma did another crime to get back in.
Unfortunately, such hijinks had to stop when Norma turned sixteen, because that’s when Texas recognized people as adults who could be sent to real prison. Not really wanting to live with her mean drunk mother, Norma got a job at a restaurant and moved in with a cousin who proceeded to rape her for three weeks straight, though nobody believed her because Norma had a proclivity for lying about all sorts of stuff. Wanting to get out of this situation, Norma married a man named Woody McCorvey who was seven years her senior. After two years of marriage, Woody knocked Norma up, but she soon after left because he also hit her during an argument. With nowhere else to go, Norma moved in with her mother and had her first child at the age of seventeen. Norma celebrated by declaring she was a lesbian and then developing a severe drinking and drug problem. Her mother responded to this by at first trying to outright steal the baby, hiding it from Norma for three months, and when that didn’t work getting her to sign away her parental rights by waiting until Norma was high as shit and telling her she was signing insurance papers. She then kicked Norma out of the house.
Norma pretty much became a drifter after that, moving down to Dallas and doing whatever she could for a place to stay and to get her hands on more booze and drugs. She became pregnant with her second child when she was nineteen, but gave the baby up for adoption, then became pregnant again when she was twenty-one. It was at this point that some friends talked her into claiming she got raped so she could get an abortion. At the time, Texas only allowed abortions in very limited circumstances and the U.S. was a patchwork of state laws varying from no abortions whatsoever to all the abortions all the time. This being Texas in the late 1960’s, Norma went with the claim that a group of Black men had gang raped her. Strangely enough for the day, nobody believed her, and so she was unable to get an abortion. It was at this time that two feminist lawyers named Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington found her. Coffee and Weddington wanted to mount a legal challenge against Texas’ abortion law and were looking for any woman willing to let them represent her in court. Norma, desperate for an abortion, agreed.
It should probably be mentioned right now that Coffee and Weddington didn’t give two shits about Norma. For them she was a means to an end and nothing else. When the case was filed, they gave Norma the pseudonym Jane Roe. This was ostensibly done to protect her identity, but in truth it was because they were worried that people being able to identify Norma as their client might hurt their case. Norma was an unemployed alcoholic drug addict who slept around to keep a roof over her head, resulting in three pregnancies with three different men. While arguably one of the exact reasons women should be given options to deal with unwanted pregnancies as they choose, Coffee and Weddington wanted the judges to imagine their wives and daughters when they thought about the case, not the shit show messed up girl from down the block. Over the five years the case wound its way through the legal system, Norma never once stepped foot in a courtroom. In addition, Coffee and Weddington never told her how long the legal case would likely last. Norma never got an abortion, instead having the baby and giving it up for adoption.
Norma’s case eventually culminated in the famous Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, when by a 7 to 2 margin the Supreme Court made abortions legal nationwide, at least through the first trimester of pregnancy, while allowing states to have various increasingly stringent rules regarding the second and third trimesters. Norma learned about this verdict like everyone else by reading it in the newspaper. By that time Norma was still living in Dallas, barely scraping by via working as a housekeeper. Though still a heavy drinker, she had managed to get her drug problem under control and had started a long-term relationship with a woman named Connie Gonzalez who she lived with. The fact that Norma was Jane Doe didn’t become common knowledge until the early 1980’s.