In this episode Trent comments on the recent documentary AKA Jane Roe which purports to include a “deathbed recanting” of Norma McCorvey’s (Roe from Roe v Wade) pro-life convictions.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
I hope you guys really enjoyed your Memorial day weekend. I had a really fun one. I got to spend time with family. I got to speak at Jason Everts Love Life Conference, hosted through virtualcatholicconference.com. I gave a talk on evangelizing its so-called LGBT pride parades. So if you want to hear that talk, you can go to virtualcatholicconference.com to buy a pass, to be able to listen to all the talks. They were streamed for free over the Memorial day weekend, but now you can purchase a pass to watch all of them at your leisure or if you are a subscriber at trenthornpodcast.com, you can check out my talk. I’ve uploaded it. Patron only bonus that’s available at trenthornpodcast.com, where for as little as $5 a month, you get access to bonus content and you make the podcast possible.
So, I just want to say thanks to our premium subscribers. Also, I’m really thankful for the subscribers. Not just for your prayers and your financial support, but a lot of times the community that we have at trenthornpodcast.com, which is also where you can comment on episodes, it’s one of the easiest ways to interact with me. Send me a message, write comments on the episode, submit questions, things like that. I’m really grateful that a lot of the people who support us they’re actually give me tips on episodes. There are people who will send me messages and say, “Hey Trent, did you hear about this?”
And I say to myself, “No, I actually didn’t hear about, about that.” I don’t think I talked to myself in that voice. Do I talk to myself like this? But in any case, I write back to them and say, “No, I hadn’t heard about this. And I go and I check it out.” And so they give me the scoop on what’s going on.
And that was the initial catalyst for this episode. Though, if I had just gone on the internet, I’m sure in about 30 minutes, I would have come across this story. So here’s what I want to talk about today. You’ve probably heard about this. There’s a documentary that was released this past weekend on FX. It’s called AKA Jane Roe and it was produced by Nick Sweeney and it’s a documentary about the Roe of Roe versus Wade, Norma McCorvey. Now she passed away a few years ago. She passed away in 2017 and this documentary purports to be her so-called deathbed confessional, where she makes dramatic claims about her involvement with the pro-life movement.
So I’ll play a little bit of the trailer so you can get an idea about it, and then I’ll fill you in on what happened and how I and other people have responded to this. And not just about … This episode, though, I want to be clear from the beginning. This is not just about Norma McCorvey and not even just Roe versus Wade or the pro-life movement. It’s about something bigger. It’s about understanding narratives. About understanding how complex the world is and how to keep our eyes focused on that when people will throw all kinds of headlines in our face. And we’re wondering, in the age of digital news, where suddenly a headline will just appear on social media and you feel just blindsided by it, like, “Well, what’s going on here? What should I believe? What I not believe?”
What I want to focus on in this episode is understanding that the world is complex and we have to approach it with a healthy amount of skepticism and thorough investigation to get at the truth of matters. Because there’s a lot of misinformation that is out there. So I’m going to play a little bit of the trailer for the documentary, and then I’ll fill you in more on it and the perspective it took
Speaker 3:
Jane Roe.
Speaker 4:
Roe. Jane Roe.
Speaker 5:
As in Roe v. Wade.
Speaker 6:
Jane Roe’s case changed the country.
Norma McCorvey:
This is my deathbed confession.
Speaker 8:
AKA Jane Roe is a documentary about Norma McCorvey, who is the real Jane Roe in the famous case of Roe versus Wade.
Speaker 9:
She got thrown into the public spotlight in the most insane way and her life changed forever.
Speaker 10:
Norma, you’ve allowed the killing of over 35 million children.
Speaker 5:
Don’t want to (bleep) with me.
Speaker 11:
Norma was-
Trent Horn:
That is a Norma, by the way, who just said that you don’t want to F with me, which will lead you to see that Norma McCorvey is an interesting person. All people are interesting. There is no such thing as an archetype. There’s no such thing as, “There’s the good guy and there’s the bad guy.” We’re all fallible human beings with different proclivities, different tendencies, different biases, and that emerges when you get the full picture of who we are as people. So, I’ll keep playing
Speaker 11:
… Seen as a symbol for pro choice.
Speaker 12:
They needed a poor woman who could not afford to travel to one of the states where abortion was legal.
Norma McCorvey:
I’m saddened that other people want to abolish something that women should naturally already have.
Trent Horn:
And that was Norma prior to her conversion to the pro-life position where she was doing interviews and she was an advocate for abortion. She wasn’t just the anonymous plaintiff for Roe vs Wade, the Supreme Court decision in 1973 that struck down every state law banning abortion. She wasn’t just the anonymous plaintiff because there was another case decided at that time. Doe versus Bolton. It was a companion case to Roe. And I think the Doe for Doe versus Bolton, Roe obviously a pseudonym, Doe was a pseudonym, Doe, I believe that woman’s name was Sandra Kaino, but she never rose to the prominence that Norma McCorvey did after the Roe versus Wade decision. First in being a public advocate for abortion, as you heard here in this clip where she’s being interviewed and she goes to rallies, and then dramatically changing sides.
Speaker 13:
So later it was stunning when she swapped sides and became a real leader in the pro-life movement.
Norma McCorvey:
I have vowed to help do anything to overturn Roe versus Wade.
Speaker 14:
Jane Roe was now on our side. We were winning this social war.
Speaker 13:
Nick had unprecedented access to Norma because I think she realized she was at the end of her life. She was able to open up to Nick in a very intimate and confessional way.
Norma McCorvey:
It’s my mind. They can’t tell me how to think.
Speaker 13:
People thought that they knew Norma’s story. People that have written her off were very surprised when Nick was showing them some interviews with her.
Speaker 15:
He brought a laptop and he played for them Norma’s last words and thoughts.
Norma McCorvey:
Okay.
Speaker 16:
Gloria Allred, one of the most media trained people in America, is left speechless by the things that Norma says.
Trent Horn:
Okay. And so what are these things that left people speechless? Well, you probably already saw the spoiler, which was used to really heavily market the documentary and that is that Norma claimed to have completely faked her … Now what was drawn from this. There’s the difference between the words that McCorvey says in the documentary. And what makes this frustrating, there’s a lot of elements that are frustrating about this story, is that she’s not here to clarify what she meant. Norma passed away in 2017 and the people in this documentary, they sat on this for a few years actually, which I find … A lot of things about this I find very suspicious.
And so they posted this out there. The thing that’s really moving it now, and headlines and things like that, is the claim that Norma McCorvey, she switched sides only for money. She was never a genuine pro-life advocate and never even a genuine Christian. So, when I heard about this, I posted this comment to Facebook prior to researching, getting ready for this episode. I just wrote the first thing I could think of because I wanted to offer people just a hot take, if you will. A first take on hearing all this.
So I said, “In a new documentary, Norma McCorvey, Roe from Roe versus Wade, gives a deathbed confession where she says she faked being pro-life for money.” I should have said, allegedly says. Part of the problem is when I put things on Facebook, sometimes I copy and paste from Twitter. So I’ll start on Twitter if I put forward a social media post and then I’ll just copy that and I’ll lengthen it a little bit for Facebook because there’s no character limit. “And claims, “If a young woman wants to have an abortion, that’s no skin off my ass. That’s why they call it choice.” And then I wrote after that, “Pray for her soul. I haven’t seen the documentary yet, but what the news reports say is not impossible. Other prominent pro-life leaders have defected in the past.”
In fact, one of the people in the documentary, the Reverend Rob Schenck is someone I’ve covered here on the podcast before. I’ll try to find that previous episode and link to it in the show description for this episode. But the Reverend Rob Schenck used to be a very active pro-life advocate and then he became a somewhat more liberal Christian and ultimately he’s abandoned the pro-life label, is effectively pro-choice. He believes abortion should be legal. And so he’s changed his mind on this. So it’s not impossible. We’ve seen it happen before, is what I said.
“I haven’t seen it. It’s not impossible. I’ll do more research on the story and try to catch the documentary before I do a podcast on the whole story next week. My only thoughts for now is this: Always put your hope in truth that never fails and solely in the truth’s fragile, sinful spokespeople.”
So I wrote that because look, like I said, I was going to do research and say, look, we don’t have all the facts here at our disposal. But let’s just take the absolute worst case scenario. That Norma McCorvey was a fraud and she played people. That she lied, because she had lied before. In order to get an abortion in Texas, she had claimed that she had been raped. But then in an interview with the Dallas newspaper in 1987, she said that was a lie. She had never actually been raped.
So, she had lied before in service of the pro choice cause and then maybe she’s lying now. It’s not impossible. Take the absolute worst case scenario. She’s simply being a mercenary. You can always take from this that our opposition to abortion does not depend on any individual’s commitment to fighting abortion. It rests on the irrefutable evidence from science and philosophy that the unborn are human beings with the same basic rights you and I have and that legal abortion is a violation of those rights and therefore abortion ought to be illegal.
Nothing changes no matter if Norma McCorvey changes her mind. It doesn’t matter if Father Frank Pavone changes his mind. Doesn’t matter if Trent Horn totally goes off the bat. If I, Trent Horn, totally go bonkers and I’ve developed a tumor in my frontal lobe and I spout all kinds of stuff.
Or maybe in the future Trent Horn has some kind of horrible tragedy in my life and it just psychically breaks me as a person and I recant what I’ve said. Even if that happens to me in the future, guess what? That won’t refute what I wrote in Answering Atheism or Persuasive Pro-Life or Why We’re Catholic or The Case for Catholicism. Whether something is true is not based on the spokespeople for it. It’s based on the arguments and evidences for it. That’s what we should focus on.
And that’s all I wanted to put out just right at the beginning, before I could get more information on this to be able to move forward. And people were sympathetic, though there were a fair number of people who replied and they accused me of detraction, or they just said, “This is fake news. This never happened.”
Well, what do you mean by this? That it’s fake news? It’d be one thing if it was someone said McCorvey told them this in an interview before she died and we didn’t have evidence of that. I’d be more inclined to say, “Oh, this is just fake news.” But look, if they’ve got somebody on tape and they can show you on tape, this person saying, “If a women wants to have an abortion, it’s no skin off my ass.” Or, “I was a good actress. We used each other.” If they have them on tape saying this stuff, then you can’t just say, “It’s fake news.”
Now there’s a whole lot of other things you could say about what it is. You could say that it’s out of context. You could say it’s deceptively edited. You could say it doesn’t adequately reflect her positions throughout her entire life, and these are hypotheses I’ll address here as we move forward in the episode.
But I don’t like when this comes out. I notice too incorrect knee jerk reactions that we have to avoid, and that centers back to this idea of tribalism. And I absolutely hate tribalism. It’s this idea that what defines you at your core is like a political party. We don’t want to look at the world through a very narrow lens of us versus them that doesn’t allow for any kind of nuance.
I’ll give you two examples of that. First would be on the other side, the liberal side of tribalism, that looks at this situation with Norma McCorvey, through the least charitable lens possible. And a good example of that would be the Young Turks, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, who are people that I really do not enjoy listening to. I enjoy listening to smart people who disagree with me, but people that just have venomous attacks and don’t have very well thought out positions, I don’t really have the time or patience for that. I’ll listen to it for the sake of doing my duty to refute these people.
But I enjoy a repartee with an intelligent critic. When I have to deal with someone who is just purely political, tribalist, plays dirty, manipulates evidence, and is just not very well informed, it’s really a lot of drudgery. Rather than just the joy that can come from having a really smart, intellectual sparring partner.
So, Cenk and Ana basically put forward like, “Well, this is just evidence the right wing lies about everything and they paid Norma McCorvey to switch sides and to become pro-life and they don’t care about truth. They’ll do anything.” So here’s in their words what they say.
Cenk Uygur:
Terrible, terrible scam that she ran. But the most important takeaway from this, she’s gone and passed now, is that the right wing does this on a regular basis. That’s why when we tell you that they’re liars, and it’s not just Donald Trump, it’s the entire party, it’s their entire movement, we’re not doing it just as an ad hominem attack. No, it’s backed up by evidence.
We’ve shown you dozens, if not maybe hundreds, of times that the right wing movement in this country has lied, cheated, stolen, and they’ve done it on purpose. They knew they were paying her. They knew they were bribing her. They didn’t care. The so-called morality party, operation rescue, the people who claim that they care about the Bible. They’re like, “Yeah, let’s lie and cheat to make sure that we get whatever we want.”
Trent Horn:
You know what, Cenk? If you want to come on the podcast or I’ll come on the Young Turks and we can talk about abortion, we can talk about the lies Planned Parenthood has peddled, the lies that abortion advocates pedal. The fact that matter is people did not pay Norma McCorvey, a half a million dollars back in 1995 or whenever to fake a conversion to become pro-life. She came and she promoted this story. And most of the money she received was probably from a right to life organization or a pregnancy care center somewhere in the rural Midwest. That really wanted to hear Norma McCorvey’s story and then flew her out and then had her speak to a group of people and she got money from doing that. So to try to use this to say that all pro-life advocates or “right-wingers” are just lying about this. That’s totally irresponsible. But what do you expect from The Young Turks?
But on the other extreme, I’ve seen pro-life advocates when they heard about this documentary, they instantly throw up the fences and say, “Nope, fake news, this never happened. This is bogus.” And say, “Well, they have her on tape saying this stuff.” So if you just say that, it looks like you’re just burying your head in the sand. Like you just don’t really care. So, I had people telling me it’s a lie, it’s fake news, go to father Pavone, go to Abby Johnson and get the real story.
So what I did was I went and followed these sources to try to figure out, okay, what is going on here? And more importantly, what can we learn from this? Not just about Norma McCorvey, what can we learn once again about narratives, about converts to social movements? What can we take from this? And it’s more complex than people make it out to be.
First, in order to understand this, in order to understand the documentary, you have to understand who Norma McCorvey was. This is summarized well in an article at the Catholic News Agency called “The Painful Journey of Jane Roe and the Pro-Life Movement” by J.D. Flynn. One of my favorite Catholic journalists out there, by the way. Check out J.D. Flynn’s work. I really appreciate it and I really appreciate that it’s nuanced. So, here’s what he writes about McCorvey:
“When she died, McCorvey had been in the spotlight and at the center of the nation’s divide over abortion for decades. Born in 1947 in Eastern Louisiana, McCorvey moved to Houston as a child and endured an unstable and abusive family life. She spent several years living in state run institutions and has reported that she was sexually abused as a child.
“She married at 16, had a daughter, and then left her husband. By 1969 she had two children, both of whom had been placed for adoption, and McCorvey was pregnant for a third time. She attempted to procure an abortion, which was illegal in Texas at that time. She filed a lawsuit which became Roe versus Wade and placed her third child for adoption.”
It’s important to know Roe, Norma McCorvey, never actually had an abortion. The case went on, but she never actually had the abortion.
“McCorvey had by then developed substance abuse problems. She began a lesbian relationship that continued for decades. She claimed at one point that she had become pregnant through rape but recanted that claim in 1987. McCorvey was for a time and advocate for pro-abortion causes and was employed by an abortion clinic until in 1995 she had a conversion to Protestant Christianity.
“She was baptized by prominent evangelical pro-life advocate and began campaigning against abortion. In 1998, McCorvey was confirmed and entered the Catholic church. McCorvey continued to practice Catholicism throughout her life and receive the anointing of the sick before her death. After her baptism, McCorvey was an outspoken opponent of abortion. She also spoke about struggles with substance abuse and mental health issues.”
So you have to understand this was somebody who had the spotlight thrusted upon her. This is a poor woman from Texas. She was the archetypal poor woman who needed an abortion, the sob story that pro-choice advocates need, and they use her. Gloria Allred, Sarah Weddington, I think was the name of her counsel, and they used her. But I’ve appreciative that pro-life advocates have come out to say that people in the pro-life movement, while the pro choice movement intentionally used McCorvey to further their ends, when Norma McCorvey switched sides and began publicly speaking against abortion in 1995, some people in the pro-life movement started to unintentionally use her as well.
So, here’s what Abby Johnson says in regards to this. And people have been pointing me to Johnson’s Facebook posts regarding this to get the full story. So here is what she said in this interview on CBN news.
Abby Johnson:
I didn’t know Norma, I wish I would have known her. I only spoke to her one time before her death and it was literally days before her death. And Norma was a very fragile person, a very vulnerable person throughout her life. She carried a tremendous burden, a self-imposed burden. 60 million babies that she felt like she was responsible for.
And one thing I know to be true is that her 22 years in the pro-life movement, of dedicating herself to overturning a law that bore her name, was very sincere. And it was very real. And what I do know is that the abortion industry manipulated her when she was young into being Jane Roe of Roe V. Wade. And I believe that they manipulated her in the very last year of her life. And what I saw in the final days of her life, when I spoke to her on the phone was a woman who was contrite. She was repentant. She was tormented by what she had allowed the abortion industry to coerce her into doing. And I believe that she absolutely died a woman who was pro-life. And I know that the abortion industry lies, and I do not believe for one second that Norma McCorvey was anything but a pro-life person.
Trent Horn:
Okay. Well, here’s the problem I have with Johnson’s analysis is that she even admits that she didn’t really know McCorvey. She only spoke to her once on the phone before she died. And she doesn’t really tell us what McCorvey told her on the phone. She may definitely be ambivalent about a lot of things related to abortion, but the fact of the matter is what she says in the documentary, it really requires a lot more of an explanation.
I just don’t see how Johnson can say, “Well, I knew that she was sincere in her entire life.” The fact of the matter is nobody knows the inner hearts of men and women. Only God knows that. Look at the scandals that we have had in our church, look at the scandals in public life, where you have somebody. They just seem like, oh, they’re fully on board with whatever they’re advocating.
And then it turns out they had this double life and they fool people. That’s not outside the realm of possibility. So, I don’t like this saying that, “Well, I know they’re sincere.” Nobody can can know that. All you can say is they seemed very committed. You can never say, “I know what was in this person’s heart.” You can say, I know their actions. You can say, I know that McCorvey spent decades working to reverse Roe versus Wade.
So, what I want to do now is play a clip from the documentary that shows we need more of an explanation than just, “Oh, I know that this person was sincere.” Because what she says is confusing at the least, if not damning at the worst. So we need more of an explanation to make sense of this. So here’s a part of it. The director, Nick Sweeney, asked Norma, did they, the pro-life movement, consider you a trophy?
And what really frustrates me is that in the whole documentary, it’s a little over an hour long, it takes almost an hour to get to this part and I wish a lot more time had been spent on it and I wish a lot more specific questions had been asked because the questions that Sweeney asks are very ambiguous and can be taken in a lot of different ways. So it’s just not helpful from someone who’s a documentarian to ask questions like this and you know that he definitely has an agenda when it comes to this. I’ll get to that in my propose explanations after we listen to the clip. But that’s the grievances that I have in dealing with this part of the documentary.
Nick Sweeney:
Did they use you as a trophy?
Norma McCorvey:
Of course. I was the big fish. I was the big fish.
Trent Horn:
So what you’re hearing right now are clips are enormous confession that are interspersed with reactions from people who claim to have known her for a long time. Though suspiciously, it’s only people who are now pro choice, like the Reverend Rob Schenck or Gloria Allred. So you’ll hear Norma speak and then you’ll hear it repeated on a laptop. And it’ll be them watching and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe this.”
Now, I wish they’d had someone like Father Frank Pavone or someone else who had known McCorvey from the pro-life movement for decades who was still pro-life, not like Reverend Rob Schenck, but someone who is still pro-life to apply context to this. So I find that suspicious. So, let’s just keep going.
Norma McCorvey:
I was the big fish.
Nick Sweeney:
Do you think they would say that you use them?
Norma McCorvey:
Well, I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they’d put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say and that’s what I’d say.
Nick Sweeney:
Give me an example of what you’d say.
Norma McCorvey:
We’ve gathered here today to pay homage to the children that are being aborted in this abortuary. We’re doing this because abortion is wrong. And I, as a farmer Jane Roe, of Roe versus Wade, do regret signing the affidavit for the pro-abortion camps. That was probably about it.
Nick Sweeney:
It was all an act?
Norma McCorvey:
Yeah. I did it well too.
Trent Horn:
All right. So what do we make of this? First, it’s possible that a lot of this is out of context or it’s misleading. In fact, there’s a petition online to Sweeney, the director, to ask him to release the unedited footage. Because I have been involved in video projects, I’ve done video for a very long time. And so I know it’s very, very easy to take footage and deceptively edit it together to make a person seem like they’re affirming a certain position when they actually aren’t. So it could be possible that in this case, “Was it all an act?” “What did you say?” “You used each other.”
It wasn’t that McCorvey’s core convictions were an act, but that she played up being extra dramatic or extra anguished when she actually didn’t feel that way. So, she was a performer. She would get extra emotional or use language and rhetoric that wasn’t normal for her, but she was coached by people to give talks to be a more effective speaker. Yet she had these core convictions against abortion, or at least she was ambivalent about abortion. There’s a lot of things about abortion she didn’t like and she didn’t like Roe versus Wade. But she acted it up as a part to facilitate the movement or something like that. So, that’s one possibility.
And it’s important to remember, once again, I’m suspicious of the people who were involved in this. They’re all pro-choice advocates. Nick Sweeney, who’s the director, other stuff, projects he’s worked on include My Transgender Summer Camp, Girls to Men, My Transgender Kid, The Sex Robots Are Coming. This is a person who is very hard in on the pro abortion side, the liberal side. So, I’m just really suspicious. A lot of these things could be out of context and that’s not the meaning that Norma intended. So, I’d want to see the full footage to be able to make up my mind. The other way of looking at this though, let’s say that it’s not out of context.
The other conclusion, the one that I strongly lean towards in all this, is that McCorvey was a very mentally unwell and depressed person who had a lot of deep personal issues. Even aside from her involvement with Roe versus Wade, which would place a psychic burden upon somebody that would seem too much for most people to bear. I couldn’t even believe carrying that kind of a burden. But aside from that, she had issues. Remember she had issues with her own sexuality. She had a relationship with a woman for a very long time that she claimed to have moved past after her conversion. But we don’t know.
She’s someone who suffered with substance abuse. She also had a lot of money problems in her life. And this documentary was actually an opportunity for her to make money. And in reports about her, she was somebody who was always trying to make money out of a situation, because I think that her life was very, very unstable. According to Ruth Graham and Slate. Now, Graham is a pro choice advocate. But I appreciate Graham in that she is very inside baseball. She how the Christian and Catholic world works and she knows the names that are involved and she actually reached out and interviewed Abby Johnson and Father Pavone in her piece to see how pro-life advocates were responding to all of this. And she talks about McCorvey and she writes in a deeply reported 2013 profile of McCorvey in Vanity Fair reporter, Joshua Prager, who wrote a biography about Norma McCorvey, portrays McCorvey as an opportunist, more than a moralist.
“In 1988, when McCorvey was still a pro choice activist, she worked with an advertising executive and others to print 1000 copies of the Roe decision for her to sign and sell. “I think it’s accurate to say that we were manipulating Norma,”” the executive told Prager, “”and that Norma was manipulating us.” McCorvey declined to participate in the vanity fair profile after demanding and being refused a $1,000 fee.”
So she was only going to be in the article about her in Vanity Fair if they paid her $1,000 and most news organizations won’t do that because it violates journalistic standards of ethics. So when it came to the documentary, she was paid in a roundabout way. So, she asked Sweeney to pay her and he wouldn’t pay her directly. So, he paid her a licensing fee to use some her personal photos in the documentary.
And in fact, Father Pavone confirms in a Life Site article that Norma texted her about this. She wrote, “I’m interviewing with a company out of New York via Australia.” This is McCorvey to father Pavone, “And I’m very happy doing it. I charged, of course. So I’ll have some bucks about that.” That same article in Life Site News.
So, this is not some kind of liberal magazine that’s out to get Norma McCorvey or something like that. This is from Life Site News. So Life Site says Prager interviewed McCorvey’s then-79-year-old former lesbian partner, who called her a phony, her mother who spoke about how she beat the F out of Norma when she was a child, her I Am Roe coauthor who recalled McCorvey’s financial situation sparse, “When I knew her, she was cashing checks at the 7/11.” And even Flip Benam who baptized her as she joined the pro-life movement who said, “McCorvey just fishes for money.”
So, that doesn’t mean that she was just a liar from the outset and she had this grand plan to deceive the pro-life movement. But I bring this up. And once again, I don’t bring this up to assassinate the character of someone, God rest her soul, who’s soul that we should pray for. But I bring it up just to show that look, people are complex. People are not one sided. And so you have to understand that people can be unwell. They can become depressed. And they can still even stand for things and have convictions, but those convictions can lose their resolve in the face of stress in life. Whether it’s spiritual, emotional, or even financial.
And it seems clear when you look at all the sources talking about Norma McCorvey, she dealt with a lot of stresses. Both physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological. And so she was very troubled and it’s not surprising she would say things like this in a documentary and maybe not even mean it. On the same news site, Life Site, Michael Brown, who is a Protestant author, he offers this important insight. He says:
“As for the idea that she might have come to believe that her previous 20 years in the pro-life movement had been a sham, it is possible that this is no different than a husband who leaves his wife of 30 years telling her, “I never loved you.” What he really means is I’m attracted to someone else. His memory of the past is distorted.”
And I appreciate that from Brown, because it could be the case that, yeah, maybe she’s lost her convictions now, or at the end of her life she’s really disenchanted and disillusioned and she’ll say these things. And it could have been possible she said those things in the moment with Sweeney and she didn’t really mean them and she was just going off about it and then later composed herself together and thought, “That was stupid. I shouldn’t have said that.” But she forgot about it because she’s near dying anyways.
And then she has these conversations with Father Pavone and Abby Johnson near the end of her life and she’s repentant and contrite. Because look, if you have a friend or let’s say you’re married, or your parents. Either your parents or your spouse, have you ever said something to them that was cruel, that was mean? That you didn’t mean, but you said it because it was hurtful or there was just an opportunity for you to say it that made you feel good.
Then you realize, I didn’t really mean that. I’m sorry. I pray that that is what happened with McCorvey. I pray that’s what happened here. That she just wanted to get these people in, make some more money before the end of her life. She’s in an assisted living center, I think in Texas, and she’s dying and she feels disconnected from people and she just is talking with him over and over and over and she’s just at the end of a rope and just says something … It’s not really what’s in her heart.
It just reveals, not a complicity with abortion, but just reveals a very sad and broken person and a person who is broken because pro-life advocates pushed her to a limit to cause her to become broken and didn’t take that into account when they were having her go and give these presentations. And there are accounts of people taking Norma McCorvey to pro-life banquets, showing her around, buying her drinks, even though she’s a recovering alcoholic.
That’s why I really appreciate what her friend Jason Jones said in a live stream he did, that Jones knew her for a long time and he talks about how the pro-life movement actually hurt McCorvey in pushing this rigorous speaking schedule on her with someone who maybe not have been ready for something like that. So here’s what he said:
Jason Jones:
This big, what became a very big abortion industry, used this young woman intentionally. When she became a Christian, when she became pro-life, we used her unintentionally. And what do I mean by that? I figured it out. I think it was in 2006, 2005. No, no, no, no. It was in 2008. I was at an event. I’m sorry for figuring this out as I’m talking to you. It’s YouTube Live. It was an event in Chicago. Norma was on stage and she was speaking and she looked at everybody and she looked out across the crowd and she just stared at us for about two minutes.
She said, “All of you hate me. All of you hate me. You’re judging me. I can feel it. You hate me.” And the rest of her speech became incoherent. She struggled with depression and whatnot. And I realized that I’m never going to ask … and I didn’t ask Norma to do this project, but I had her do other things for me, other speaking events, things like that. I said, “I’m never going to ask Norma to do anything again.” This is a woman who’s my friend who I’m just going to try to love and support. I’m just going to try to be there for her.
And I would actually try to dissuade people. “No, you don’t want Norma to speak.” And I felt like a bad friend because people want to talk, people want to have a message, they want to say it. I just felt that Norma needed to tend to herself. That she needed to take care of herself. But it’s a big country, 300 plus million people. There are lots of events going on and a lot of people were excited to have the Roe of Roe versus Wade speak.
None of them were thinking, “I want to use this woman. I’m going to take advantage of this woman.” They were eager to let her share her story. But the way I look at it is like the prodigal son comes back from Egypt. And the first thing his brother did was like, “Look, man, your story is powerful. I got you a book deal. I got you a publicist. I got you a speaking agent. We’ve already got seven speeches booked. We’ve got a bunch of television shows for you.”
Your brother just came back from Egypt, the story of the prodigal son. He’s like, “I was just hoping to hang out with you and dad for awhile. I don’t know if we’re wanting to go on a speaking tour.” Or even if he’s like, “Yes, Egypt was horrible. I got a lot to say.” You might be like, “Why don’t you just hang out with dad now for a little bit, you know?”
Trent Horn:
So I appreciate what Jason says here. And it’s actually similar to some things that Abby Johnson said in her Facebook post. She said:
“Were there mistakes made when Norma joined the pro-life movement? I’m sure there were. Jane Roe joining the pro-life cause was certainly unexpected and I think people didn’t know what to do with her. I’m not sure people truly saw or understood the tremendous burden she carried when she first left.”
So, here’s what I want you to take away from this. Pray for the soul of Norma McCorvey, pray for the repose of her soul, pray for the babies who have been aborted, pray for abortion to end and pray for pro-life activists who were involved in this. I’m grateful, honestly, in being a Catholic apologist, that I only have to face abortion and pro-life ethics as a part of my work. Because I remember when I was doing pro-life work full time, it takes a tremendous psychic strain on you.
Pro-life, you’re dealing with death and the macabre and evil and just merciless opponents and it takes a toll on you. And even if you have a very strong spiritual foundation and psychological foundation and emotional support from others, it still takes a toll on you. And I can only imagine that for somebody like McCorvey, who is also dealing with substance abuse issues, same sex attraction, being thrusted into the spotlight, having financial issues. So pray for her, pray for an end to abortion. And just remember once again that people are complex. When you hear stories in the news, when you hear about these things happening, resist looking at it through a very simple, one-sided, tribalist lens of, “Where does this fit in the narrative of us versus them?” Because people are complicated. We have to pray for them, not just our allies who need us, but even our enemies who oppose us.
I remember a guy once said to love your enemies, right? Pray for your enemies. Pray for those who curse you. Because people are complicated in that way. So, I think that’s important for us to keep this in mind. That this obviously should not shake anybody’s faith in the pro-life movement or in Christianity, but it should shake your hasty decision in some cases to want to take someone who’s a new convert, for example, and thrust them into the spotlight.
So, we have a tendency of that, right? It’s like, “Oh, look at this person who just became Catholic.” Or “Hey, look at this person who’s now pro-life.” And you want to get them out there. In fact, in first Timothy chapter three, St. Paul tells Timothy, hey, “A new convert should not be a bishop less he fall and the devil will ensnare him. We need to make sure that people have their roots first before they are called by God and have discerned that to go and to speak in the limelight.
“And even if they do do that, to be mindful of them, to watch that person. And if they’re starting to suffer fractures in their, their personal self or they’re falling into sinful temptations to rescue them from the dangers of being in the limelight and being in the spotlight and bringing them into the presence of Jesus Christ so that they can know his goodness.”
So the only light we should ever seek out, don’t seek out the limelight, but when I go and speak, I feel the devil attack me more than any other time. A lot of times he chooses to just make the dishwasher break when I’m out of town and I can’t be there to help my wife.
So be grateful if the one light you can just be in is in that light of Christ and feeling secure in that and you’re maybe not called to go out into public to fight for this, but you’re called to be on your knees every day to pray for the people who do. God bless you. I appreciate your prayers. I know those prayers are keeping me and my family safe and we need those prayers. Norma needs those prayers now. The people who are in Norma’s shoes today need those prayers now so that they are able to withstand the assault that the evil one makes against us.
So, sorry for an extra long episode. Once again, a lot of us are still in quarantine. Don’t have a lot of places to go. I hope it was helpful for you. And once again, I just want to say, I did not intend this episode to be any kind of character assassination on Norma McCorvey or to speak ill of the dead or anything like that.
My goal is just to show a more complete picture of the human person, a child of God for us to pray for, and to keep into consideration and to always interpret in the most charitable light we can that look, if somebody does something, whether they’re your friend or your enemy, and they do something wrong, try to interpret it in the most charitable way possible. That’s what God would want us to do and you won’t fall into cynicism if you interpret people the most charitable you can.
Now don’t be an idiot about it. Don’t just be naive and disregard the fact that someone could have ill motives. If the facts speak in that direction, definitively, then go in that direction. But always try to maintain charity throughout. And that’s what I’ve tried to do here. And I hope this advice is helpful for you all listening and will encourage you and build you up to go out.
Because look, even though the evil one, the devil, will attack us as we stand up, especially for little babies, but I’m not afraid of the devil because I have God on my side. I’ve got St. Michael the Archangel. St. Michael the Archangel, be with us in battle. He is with us in battle. Let’s bring him here with us and always rest secure in that as we go and fight these good fights that God requires from us. And I hope you’ll do that and I hope this podcast will equip you to do that. So, thank you guys so much, and I just hope you enjoy the rest of the week. Looking forward to new episodes with you later on in the week. So, thank you guys so much and have a very pleasant day.
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