‘Jane Roe’ Joins Abortion Opponents Woman Behind Landmark Ruling Baptized By Operation Rescue Leader

The woman best known as “Jane Roe,” whose struggle to obtain an abortion led to the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision, has renounced her role in the abortion rights movement and been baptized a born-again Christian by the leader of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.

Until this week, Norma McCorvey worked as marketing director at A Choice for Women, a Dallas clinic that performs abortions. She sparred regularly with the Rev. Flip Benham, national director of Operation Rescue, who moved his group’s offices next door to the clinic four months ago. She called him “Flipper.” He called her “Miss Norma.”

Their sparring led to long conversations about McCorvey’s spiritual life. Tuesday night, it was Benham who yelled “hallelujah” after dunking McCorvey in a baptismal pool.

“I think abortion is wrong,” McCorvey told ABC News, which broke the story Thursday night. “I think what I did was wrong. And I just had to take a pro-life position on choice.”

“God gave Norma to us,” Benham told ABC News.

McCorvey and Benham found common ground in pasts of hard living and hard drinking. Benham owned a bar near Disney World in Florida and drank away most of what he made before finding God and seeking ordination in the Free Methodist Church.

McCorvey, 47, is a one-time carnival barker, drug dealer and housecleaner who had a drinking problem. In her 1994 book, “I Am Roe: My Life, Roe vs. Wade, and Freedom of Choice,” she wrote of being abused at home, raped as a teenager, married at 16 and abused as a wife.

Pregnant for the third time, McCorvey sought an abortion in 1970. She told attorney Sarah Weddington she had been raped. Weddington pressed McCorvey’s case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and won.

But the 1973 verdict came too late for McCorvey, who carried the child to term and gave it up for adoption.

“Jane Roe” later admitted that she had lied that she had been raped. But McCorvey told ABC News she has been haunted all these years by things such as empty swings in a playground. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, the playgrounds are empty because there’s no children because they’ve all been aborted.”’

Leaders of the abortion rights movement, including her former attorneys Weddington and Gloria Allred, played down the impact of McCorvey’s apparent turnaround.

“Luckily, it doesn’t matter what Norma McCorvey’s doing today,” Weddington said in a telephone interview with The Washington Post. “The fact that she was working in a clinic on Tuesday wasn’t any particular help, and the fact that she’s working for Operation Rescue on Wednesday doesn’t hurt.”

Said Allred, “I thank God and pro-choice activists that we live in a country where women like Norma can choose to be pro-abortion or anti-abortion according to their own conscience.”

Weddington said McCorvey’s defection to a movement that has courted her is understandable for a troubled woman who craves acceptance. “She’s a person who has, in recent years, really craved and sought attention, and I think she thought she felt she wasn’t given enough attention” by pro-choice advocates. In Flip Benham and Operation Rescue, “she has found someone to do that.”

McCorvey’s conversion was embraced immediately by the anti-abortion movement, already buoyed by a string of recent congressional victories limiting abortions. McCorvey was praised as a hero by National Right to Life, Operation Rescue and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities.

Benham was unavailable for comment because he was holding a news conference in Dallas. McCorvey did not respond to messages left with her roommate.

McCorvey told ABC that her new friends in the anti-abortion movement “accept me for who I am, not what I’ve done or what I can do for them. They genuinely love me.”

Based on their interpretation of Scripture, this wing of the anti-abortion movement clearly condemns homosexual behavior. Yet, for 21 years, McCorvey has been in a lesbian relationship with her roommate, Connie Gonzalez, and has not indicated she intends to renounce that.

“All I know,” Gonzalez said Thursday in a terse telephone interview, “is that Norma has become a Christian.”