The woman who, as "Jane Roe," challenged Texas' law prohibiting abortion and won a case that overturned every state law restricting abortion, told the Massachusetts Citizens for Life the story of how she turned her life around. 

The annual banquet was among the Citizens' largest ever, with nearly eight hundred people in attendance. 

Among the honored guests was Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives Thomas Finneran.  Mr. Finneran thanked the Citizens for carrying on their struggle against a "culture of death," and he thanked his fellow legislators for standing up for their beliefs in the face of the majority's scorn, ridicule and contempt. 

The Speaker said that the pro-life effort depends on the the efforts of individuals to change one life at a time, one day at a time, in addition to the struggle to transform the larger culture. 

Norma McCorvey claimed to have been raped in 1970, and was used by pro-abortion groups as a plaintiff to bring a suit claiming that state laws restricting abortion were unconstitutional. 

She later confessed that the story of her rape was a lie.  She gave birth to the child and put him up for adoption. 

In the years after the case, she worked at four abortion clinics, became a drug addict and a lesbian.  McCorvey told the audience of the steps she went through on her way to becoming a religious, pro-life, drug-free ex-lesbian. 

She was troubled, she said, by a woman who came into a clinic for a second-trimester abortion and by a woman who sought an abortion because the baby was not the sex she wanted. 

On other occasions, women thanked her for legalizing the abortions they had had -- one said she had had as many as ten. 

The final steps in McCorvey's conversion came when Operation Rescue set up shop in the same building as the abortion clinic in which she was working.  The breakthrough came when a priest told her that "God is pro-choice," and referred her to Deuteronomy 30: 19.  The verse says:  "I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing:  therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live:  That thou mayest love the Lord thy God, and that thou mayest obey his voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto him: for he is thy life, and the length of thy days:  that thou mayest dwell in the land which the Lord sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them." 

In 1995 she accepted Jesus, was baptized and began to work for Operation Rescue, although she still believed that abortion should be allowed in the first trimester of pregnancy.  When she saw one of their fetal development charts (a chart never exhibited in the offices of abortionists, she noted), she became completely pro-life. 

She later began to pray the rosary and to take instruction in the Roman Catholic faith, and was confirmed in August of this year. 

McCorvey is now on a tour promoting the book that tells her story:  Won by Love, published this year by Thomas Nelson. 

Read our In-Depth Feature Story:  The Radical Roe Decision 

STORY ARCHIVES ON ABORTION IN MASSACHUSETTS 
 

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