The baby who changed US history reveals her identity and talks about abortion

By Scott Stump - NBC News

The girl whose conception was the genesis of the lawsuit known as Roe v. Wade, who made abortion a protected right in the United States, is now a 51-year-old woman ready to tell her story.

Shelley Lynn Thornton has come forward after decades of anonymity to publicly identify herself as "Baby Roe" in Joshua Prager's new book The Family Roe: An American Story, out September 14, which a fragment was published this Thursday in The Atlantic magazine.

"My relationship with Roe began and ended because I was conceived," Thornton says in the excerpt.

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The lawsuit by her biological mother, known under the pseudonym Jane Roe, became the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that guaranteed the right of women to legal abortions across the country, although her mom never got to do it and she had it.

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"In his majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun noted that a pregnancy will go to term before the usual appeals process is complete," Prager writes in the book.

Even so, the Dallas waitress's defiance of the Texas ban led to a sweeping change in laws across the country.

Thornton's public appearance comes amid a heated debate in which this state is once again the epicenter of the abortion fight after the Supreme Court refused to block a restrictive state law banning voluntary termination of pregnancy after the sixth week and allows anyone to sue abortion providers or others who help women get the procedure after that time.

Thornton is the daughter of Norma McCorvey, the real name of Jane Roe. McCorvey, who revealed her identity shortly after the landmark case, died at age 69 in 2017 after a difficult public life.

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McCorvey was initially pro-abortion, then shifted to an anti-abortion stance after a religious conversion. She later revealed in a shocking deathbed confession of hers, recorded in a documentary, that a religious organization paid her an exorbitant amount of money to publicly behave as a pro-life activist even though she did not believe in that. point of view.

Thornton was born in a Dallas hospital in 1970 as the third of McCorvey's three daughters, whom she did not raise. She was two years old when the sentence was entered and she lived with her adoptive parents in Texas.

Her existence became a symbol for anti-abortion activists.

Thornton's adoptive mother, Ruth Schmidt, told her when she was little that she had been adopted, and Thornton said she longed to meet her birth parents.

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In 1989 McCorvey began searching for Thornton, even going so far as to appear on NBC's TODAY show to express his hope of finding his third daughter. He already knew the other two, but had little information on Thornton.

A National Enquirer investigation led him to find her as a teenager living outside Seattle. The same publication informed her that she was McCorvey's biological daughter. However, at her request, her name was not included in the subsequent article, which was published in 1989.

Thornton recalls that she began to "tremble and cry" when she learned the difficult truth: she was the daughter of the plaintiff in the famous case.

The abortion debate entered Thornton's life in 1991, when she became pregnant at age 20. She decided to have her child but she did not understand why the abortion decision should be "a government concern."

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In the National Enquirer article she was described as being pro-vid”, which bothered her, as she clarified to Joshua Prager, she told the reporter that she “didn't see herself having an abortion” .

To Thornton, pro-lifers represented "a bunch of religious fanatics who go around making protests."

But then, she didn't consider herself pro-abortion either.

"Norma was pro-abortion, and it seemed to Shelley that having an abortion would make her no different from Norma," Prager wrote.

But abortion "wasn't part of who she was," so she had the baby.

Thornton, now a mother of three and living in Arizona, nearly met McCorvey in person in 1994 before a hectic phone conversation derailed the encounter.

McCorvey said Thornton should have thanked him for not aborting her.

"I was like, 'What? I'm supposed to thank you for getting you pregnant...and then giving me away,'" Thornton recalled. "I told him that I would never, ever thank him for not aborting me," she added.

Thornton has since met his two half-sisters, but was not reunited with McCorvey before his death.

After years of keeping her secret and worrying about someone sharing her story publicly, she decided to share it herself.

"I want everyone to understand that this is something I have chosen to do," he said.