Norma McCorvey, Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, dies at 69

Norma McCorvey, who was 22, unwed, mired in addiction and poverty, and desperate for a way out of an unwanted pregnancy when she became Jane Roe, the pseudonymous plaintiff in the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right to an abortion, died Feb. 18 at an assisted-living facility in Katy, Texas. She was 69.

Her death was confirmed by Joshua Prager, a journalist working on a book about Roe v. Wade. The cause was a heart ailment.

McCorvey was a complicated protagonist in a legal case that became a touchstone in the culture wars, celebrated by champions as an affirmation of women's freedom and denounced by opponents as the nationwide legalization of murder of the unborn.

When she filed suit in 1970, she was looking not for a sweeping ruling for all women from the highest court in the land, but rather, simply, the right to legally and safely end a pregnancy that she did not wish to carry forward. In her home state of Texas, as in most other states, abortion was prohibited except when the mother's life was at stake.

On Jan. 22, 1973, the Supreme Court handed down its historic 7-to-2 ruling, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, articulating a constitutional right to privacy that included the choice to terminate a pregnancy.

The ruling established the trimester framework, designed to balance a woman's right to control her body and a state's compelling interest in protecting unborn life. Although later modified, it was a landmark of American jurisprudence and made Jane Roe a figurehead - championed or reviled - in the battle over reproductive rights that continued into the 21st century.

McCorvey fully shed her courtroom pseudonym in the 1980s, lending her name first to supporters of abortion rights and then, in a stunning reversal, to the cause's fiercest critics as a born-again Christian. But even after two memoirs, she remained an enigma, as difficult to know as when she shielded her identity behind the name Jane Roe.

She admitted that she peddled misinformation about herself, lying about even the most crucial juncture in her life: For years, she claimed that the Roe pregnancy was the result of a rape. In 1987, she recanted, saying that she had become pregnant 'through what I thought was love.” Although the details of her account were legally unimportant, abortion foes pointed to the lie to discredit McCorvey and her case.

According to the most sympathetic tellings of her story, she was a victim of abuse, financial hardship, drug and alcohol addiction, and personal frailty. For much of her life, she subsisted at the margins of society, making ends meet, according to various accounts, as a bartender, a maid, a roller-skating carhop and a house painter. She found a measure of stability with a lesbian partner, Connie Gonzalez, but even that relationship reportedly ended in bitterness after 35 years.