-- Adolph Reed Jr., "Martyrs and False Populists"
Request filed to overturn Roe v. Wade 06/17/2003
By TERRI LANGFORD / The Dallas Morning News
The woman whose pseudonym became forever linked with legalizing abortion in the United States more than 30 years ago went to federal court on Tuesday to overturn her own case, the landmark decision known as Roe v. Wade.
Lawyers for Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff known as Jane Roe in the Roe v. Wade case, filed a motion asking the federal judiciary in Dallas to hold a hearing on the matter.
“I feel good about myself. I really do. I feel like the weight of the world has been lifted from my shoulders,” Ms. McCorvey said at a downtown Dallas news conference. She was surrounded by about 50 women who had abortions but now regretted doing so. Many cried as they held signs that read “Abortion Hurts Women.”
Allan Parker, chief executive officer for the San Antonio-based Texas Justice Foundation, said the case was filed because too little was known about the affect of abortion on women at the time the case came before the highest court in the United States.
As the plaintiff in the case, Mr. Parker said Ms. McCorvey had the right to have the case re-opened.
“We’re getting our babies back,” Ms. McCorvey told the crowd of supporters, who cheered.
Dallas is the city where Ms. McCorvey’s legal story began decades ago.
In 1969, Ms. McCorvey’s attorneys filed a lawsuit against Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade. The case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, when justices ruled that Ms. McCorvey and other women had the right to "be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.'
The decision came too late for Ms. McCorvey to have an abortion. She gave birth to the child.
If Ms. McCorvey’s motion for a hearing is granted, the proceedings could open the door again to having the case eventually heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Norma McCorvey changed her mind about abortion in the decades since her lawyers pursued her case, but her action on Tuesday marks the first time she has try to reverse the case in court.
Ms. McCorvey publicly aligned herself with abortion foes in 1995, at about the time she baptized in a Garland swimming pool by anti-abortion advocate Rev. Flip Benham.
Legal scholars were confident that even if the case were reheard, it would have little affect on the status of abortion in the United States.
“The Roe framework has been changed and altered and in some ways not reaffirmed as is, so we have much later precedent that guides a lot of these decisions now,” said Joan Krause, associate director for academic programs of the Health, Law and Policy Institute of the University of Houston Law Center.
Email tlangford at dallasnews.com
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