The baby at the center of Roe v. Wade, which gave women the right to have an abortion in the US, has revealed her identity for the first time in The Atlantic.
Shelley Lynn Thornton, a 51-year-old mother-of-three, has come forward to reveal that she is the youngest daughter of Norma McCorvey – the woman known as Jane Roe – and grew up with adoptive parents who didn’t believe in abortion.
Thornton, who never met her birth mother in person before McCorvey’s death in 2017, told journalist Joshua Prager she had decided to speak out after more than half a century of secrecy because she wanted to free herself from the ‘secrets and lies.’
‘Secrets and lies are, like, the two worst things in the whole world. I’m keeping a secret, but I hate it,’ she said, in an adapted excerpt from Prager’s new book ‘The Family Roe: An American Story’, published in The Atlantic.
‘I want everyone to understand that this is something I’ve chosen to do.’
She said her views on abortion are now complex, saying ‘I don’t understand why it’s a government concern’ but revealing that when she fell pregnant at 20 she decided abortion was ‘not part of who I was.’
Norma McCorvey aka ‘Jane Roe’ (left) and her attorney Gloria Allred at the Supreme Court building in Washington in 1989. The baby at the center of Roe v. Wade, which gave women the right to have an abortion in the US, has revealed her identity for the first time
The Atlantic revealed that Shelley Lynn Thornton, 51, is the youngest daughter of Norma McCorvey – the woman known as Jane Roe – in an adapted excerpt from journalist Joshua Prager’s new book ‘The Family Roe: An American Story’ (above), our September 14
McCorvey, then 22 and living in Texas, filed a lawsuit in 1970 under the name ‘Jane Roe,’ asking to be able to have an abortion.
She was unmarried and had already given birth to two other daughters, who she had given up for adoption.
At the time, abortion was illegal except for where the mother’s life was at risk.
The suit, which came to define reproductive rights across America, rumbled on until 1973.
By this time, McCorvey had given birth to the baby, given her up for adoption and the toddler was two-and-a-half and living with new parents.
The revelation about the identity of the baby at the center of the landmark case comes as Roe v. Wade and the debate around abortion laws have taken center stage in the US once again.
Last week, Texas implemented a new law that effectively undercut the 1973 ruling and saw the introduction of the most extreme abortion law across the country.
The law, dubbed the ‘Texas Heartbeat Act’, bans abortions from when a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which is typically after six weeks of pregnancy – before many women even know they are pregnant.
The ban does not make exceptions for women who are victims of rape or incest, with the only exception being to save the life of the mother.
The law took effect last Wednesday when the conservative-heavy Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of upholding it and denying a request from abortion providers to block it.
Rather than enforcement by state officials, the new law gives private citizens the right to sue women who get abortions or anyone who helps them get abortions for $10,000.
McCorvey in 1998. Shelley Lynn Thornton, 51, has come forward to reveal that she is the youngest daughter of McCorvey – the woman known as Jane Roe
Thornton had always known she was adopted and had longed to make contact with her birth mother, she told Prager in the excerpt shared by The Atlantic.
But she said she has suffered from depression and anxiety for years – something she attributes at least in part to knowing she was ‘not wanted’ by her birth mom.
‘When someone’s pregnant with a baby and they don’t want that baby, that person develops knowing they’re not wanted,’ said Thornton.
Thornton told Prager that neither she nor her adoptive parents learned she was the infant dubbed the ‘Roe baby’ by the anti-abortion community until almost two decades after the landmark case.
In 2007, McCorvey publicly spoke out to say she wanted to track down her third child, reported The Atlantic.
The National Enquirer carried out an investigation with the help of a woman named Toby Hanft, who had given her own daughter up for adoption when she was younger and now worked connecting birth mothers with the children they had given up.
Hanft managed to identify and track down Thornton, according to Prager.
When Thornton found out her mom was Jane Doe, she said she knew little about the Supreme Court case other than it ‘made it OK for people to go out and be promiscuous’, according to the book excerpt published in The Atlantic.
Melissa Mills (pictured), the eldest of McCorvey’s daughters, has also spoken out to CBS after her half-sister’s identity was revealed in The Atlantic
‘The only thing I knew about being pro-life or pro-choice or even Roe v. Wade was that this person had made it OK for people to go out and be promiscuous,’ she told Prager, whose book ‘The Family Roe: An American Story’ is published September 14.
She said she was left ‘shaking all over and crying’ following the bombshell revelation.
Two years after the Enquirer article was published and as an unmarried 20-year-old, Thornton said she found out she was pregnant.
She was already planning to wed her partner Doug but she was ‘not at all’ eager to become a mother and Doug suggested they consider an abortion, she said, according to the excerpt.
Thornton said her ties to the Roe v. Wade case had caused her to rethink her views on abortion.
Thornton told Prager, in the excerpt obtained by The Atlantic, that she had come to the conclusion that religion and politics should not play a part in abortion law.
Norma McCorvey (left) and her attorney Gloria Allred (right) hold hands as they leave the Supreme Court building in Washington after sitting in while the court listened to arguments in a Missouri abortion case in 1989
‘I guess I don’t understand why it’s a government concern,’ she said.
But she realized that abortion was ‘not part of who I was’ and decided to keep the baby – a son – and ensure he felt wanted.
‘I knew what I didn’t want to do,’ she said.
‘I didn’t want to ever make him feel that he was a burden or unloved.’
Thornton and Doug now have two more children – daughters born in 1999 and 2000.
Thornton told Prager she had a difficult relationship with her biological mother and never met her in person before she died.
She recalled a heated conversation in 1994 when McCorvey called her to say she and her long-term partner Connie wanted to visit her, according to the book extract in The Atlantic.
Thornton recalled that she asked her birth mom to be ‘discreet’ with her partner in front of her young son.
‘How am I going to explain to a 3-year-old that not only is this person your grandmother, but she is kissing another woman?’ she recalled, per the book.
Thornton said McCorvey shouted at her and told her she should be grateful to her for not aborting her.
‘I was like, ‘What?! I’m supposed to thank you for getting knocked up… and then giving me away,’ she told Prager.
‘I told her I would never, ever thank her for not aborting me.’
Thornton was the only child of her adopted parents Ruth Schmidt and Billy Thornton, who – after being unable to conceive their own child – reached out to attorney Henry McCluskey to help them adopt.
The couple took her home at three days old in June 1970, with no knowledge that their child was at the center of the high-profile lawsuit.
Melissa Mills, the eldest of McCorvey’s daughters, has also spoken out to CBS after her half-sister’s identity was revealed in The Atlantic.
‘My mom never had an abortion. No, she had Shelley before the abortion law passed,’ she said in the clip of the interview which will air on CBS Mornings Friday.
Mills said that, despite the landmark abortion law being born from her birth mom’s lawsuit, McCorvey wasn’t told when the law passed.
‘Yeah, quite a bit before I think and they didn’t even call her. Mom didn’t even know that the abortion law had passed,’ she said.
‘They didn’t even include her on any of that so she really wasn’t involved – they didn’t want her to be.
‘They said she really wasn’t the type of person that they needed even though they used her case.’
When asked ‘what does Norma McCorvey mean to you?’, Mills replied: ‘That’s my mom.’
Source: Daily Mail