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In the case of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court said there couldn’t be excessive government restriction on abortion. Side note: Fuck you, Texas.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: January 22, 1973--
Who was Roe, and who was Wade? Jane Roe was a pseudonym for Norma McCorvey; she did not have a happy life. Raised by an abusive alcoholic mother, repeatedly raped by a cousin, then married to an abusive man at 16, she left her husband when she was pregnant with her first child. After giving birth she got into booze and drugs and her mother coerced Norma into giving her custody. A year later she gave birth to another child and put it up for adoption. Then in 1969 she became pregnant again, and Texas said tough shit.
Age 21 and living in Dallas, McCorvey was depressed and unemployed. Her friends said hey tell them you were gang raped by Black men and they’ll let you have an abortion. That’s what she did, which was shitty, but save some blame for those who made the draconian laws that drove her to it. The scheme didn’t work. Norma then attempted to obtain an illegal abortion without success.
Attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington were looking for someone seeking an abortion to argue on their behalf. McCorvey’s example became Jane Roe, although she didn’t attend any of the trials. The process took years, during which Norma was forced to carry the fetus to term, giving it up for adoption.
The Dallas district attorney was Henry Wade. His previous claim to fame was prosecuting Jack Ruby for killing Lee Harvey Oswald for killing JFK yes Oswald acted alone shut the fuck up. The case of Roe v. Wade was first argued in front of the Supreme Court in December of 1971. A preliminary opinion said this Texas law is bullshit, but the case needed to be reargued in October of 1972.
The decision took over three months. A sticking point was the “cut off” for how late in the pregnancy an abortion could be performed. Justice Harry Blackmun pushed for 12 weeks, but the others in favor of Roe pushed for it to be double that, based on when a fetus was hypothetically viable outside the womb. Blackmun was swayed, writing in his decision that some “may refuse to face the fact of pregnancy and … not get around to medical consultation until the end of the first trimester …” or later. The case was decided for Roe 7—2 on January 22, 1973. Hasn’t stopped regressive forced birth states from enacted bullshit laws that violate it. Fucking Texas. Fucking Mississippi. And fucking Alabama and a bunch of other places too, finding all sorts of creative ways to force birth.
In 1987 McCorvey admitted that the rape claim was bogus. Sadly, in 1995 an evangelical forced-birth fucknut minister used McCorvey, bribing the desperate woman with cash to campaign against abortion. Norma confessed as much on her deathbed. Norma McCorvey died in 2017 at the age of 69.
June 24, 2022 Update: MOTHERFUCKERS! We fucking warned you about the Supreme Court. And now Roe is dead. Fuck.
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I had to move to Texas for financial and family matters and hated it. Now I'm thoroughly defeated and disgusted. We were warned. And now the rest of hard won rights will disappear one by one. The few will decide for the many. I admit I've been looking at expat possibilities. And I admit that if I ever manage to escape this place I will tell people I'm Canadian or something because being American right now is fucking embarrassing. Thanks for all that you do, and if you ever find enough profanity to sufficiently describe this shitshow, I'll be happy to hear them. But even those don't seem to be enough for people to wake the fuck up before all our rights are gone.