The Roe Baby
For The Atlantic, Joshua Prager uncovers the identity of the woman whose impending birth was at the center of Roe v. Wade. Her name is Shelley Lynn Thornton, and her birth mother, Norma McCorvey, was the plaintiff in the monumental abortion rights case. McCorvey never had the abortion that she sued for, and she gave Thornton up for adoption at birth. Prager writes, “The pro-life community saw the unknown child as the living incarnation of its argument against abortion. It came to refer to the child as ‘the Roe baby.’” Thornton, for her part, rejects this narrative. “From Shelley’s perspective, it was clear that if she, the Roe baby, could be said to represent anything, it was not the sanctity of life but the difficulty of being born unwanted.”