Opinion

REVIEW: AKA Jane Roe

Norma McCorvey, who 50 years ago was the lead plaintiff in the landmark Roe v. Wade case, reveals herself as salty, intelligent and deeply wounded in Nick Sweeney’s documentary AKA Jane Roe.
Norma McCorvey, who 50 years ago was the lead plaintiff in the landmark Roe v. Wade case, reveals herself as salty, intelligent and deeply wounded in Nick Sweeney’s documentary AKA Jane Roe.

We should not be too cynical about cynicism.

While we should admit the evidence of our own eyes, and acknowledge that people are capable of selfless acts and kindness, there are times when we can't afford to take people's representations as face value.

AKA Jane Roe

87 Cast: Documentary, with Norma McCorvey, Rob Schenck, Flip Benham, Andy Meisler, Charlotte Taft

Director: Nick Sweeney

Rating: TV-MA

Running time: 1 hour, 19 minutes

AKA Jane Roe is available for streaming on Hulu

When someone is trying to sell you something, it's fair to wonder about their motives and to assume they are acting self-servingly. Cynicism is a defense against spin and manipulation, and I wish more people on social media would be cynical about the memes they repost.

My reaction to the nut-graph revelation of the new FX documentary AKA Jane Roe -- that the once-anonymous plaintiff in the landmark Roe v. Wade case, who in 1995 declared herself "born again" and an ally of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue -- was analogous to Captain Renault's discovery that gambling was going on in Rick's Café Américain in Casablanca. Yeah, color me shocked that Norma McCorvey turned out to be a bit of a mercenary.

Still, the film, which unfolds like a mystery, provides us with a deeply interesting character study of a woman who was cynically used by both sides of the abortion debate, and who may well have felt justified in getting what she could out of the situation she was thrust into.

When in the final minutes of AKA Jane Roe director Nick Sweeney asks the no-longer-anonymous and obviously dying McCorvey if she felt like a "trophy" for the anti-abortion movement, she answers: "Of course. I was the Big Fish. I took their money and they took me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say ... I'm a good actress. Of course, I'm not acting now."

I think she thinks she's being about as truthful as she can be. McCorvey, who died in 2017, was terribly damaged as a child and teenager, and it's sometimes difficult even for those of us who have lived our lives surrounded by people who support and love us unconditionally to always understand our own motives. I think money mattered to McCorvey, just the same as it matters to most of us.

I'm also disgusted by the ways both sides treated McCorvey when it was convenient to trot her out as a symbol. As good an actress as she might have been, she was not, as abortion rights advocate Charlotte Taft frankly admits, the sort of "poster girl that would have been helpful to the pro-choice movement."

McCorvey was a poor, uneducated, hardscrabble child who'd suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a relative, done a stint in a reformatory, endured a brief teenage marriage and given birth to two children when, in 1969 at the age of 21, she found herself pregnant again. She tried to obtain an abortion in Texas, where the procedure was illegal except when necessary to save the mother's life.

This eventually led to her becoming the lead plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled individual state laws banning abortion unconstitutional.

Few people realize that McCorvey never had an abortion. She was seen as an ideal client to test the constitutionality of the law because she was impoverished and unable to travel out of state to obtain a legal abortion elsewhere. It took more than three years for Roe v. Wade to be decided; McCorvey first found out about the decision through a newspaper headline, long after she'd had her third child and given it up for adoption. The victory had no bearing on her.

When her lawyer called her to give her the news, McCorvey says she felt no elation.

"Why would I be excited? I had a baby, but I gave her away. It's for all the women who come after me," she says.

"I know how I felt when I found out that I was pregnant and I wasn't going to let another woman feel that way -- cheap, dirty and no good," McCorvey says in the film. "Women make mistakes, and they make mistakes with men, and things happen. It's just Mother Nature at work. You can't stop it. You can't explain it. It's just something that happens."

Sweeney has said his film is not about the abortion issue, but instead intended on painting a portrait of a woman who was caught between two political factions that were oblivious to her humanity.

The pro-choice crowd sought to keep her out of the spotlight, lest she make embarrassing admissions that damaged her credibility. And then, after she wrote her autobiography, she was approached by Flip Benham, an evangelical minister who in 1995 baptized her in a backyard pool, and arranged for her to speak at anti-abortion protests. Benham became kind of a manager for McCorvey, who published a second memoir in 1998, detailing how she came to oppose abortion.

In AKA Jane Roe, Benham remembers with pride how McCorvey, who even before becoming pregnant for the third time, identified as a lesbian (Benham would convince her to break up with her girlfriend of 35 years, though the women continued to cohabitate "platonically"), appeared at demonstrations where he burned the LGBT flag and the Quran. He takes responsibility for converting her from "spawn of Satan" to "child of God."

A more subtle, self-aware view is expressed by Rev. Rob Schenck, who recalls that, as a leader in the anti-abortion movement, he had checks made out to her and occasionally "gave her envelopes full of cash."

"I never felt like I was paying an actress," Schenck says, "but I did feel like I was paying for services rendered. So she went out, she represented the movement, she spoke at events, and we would compensate her accordingly."

And part of the reason Schenck, who has since distanced himself from the anti-abortion movement, says he paid McCorvey was out of fear "she would go back to the other side."

"There were times I wondered: Is she playing us?" he says. "And what I didn't have the guts to say was, 'because I know damn well we were playing her.' ... What we did with Norma was highly unethical."

Schenck's words jibe with the McCorvey we see on camera. She's salty, engagingly smart and funny and, yes, hungry for attention. She quotes MacBeth and jokes about being "a very glamorous person."

Sweeney filmed her on election night 2016, where she expresses support for Hillary Clinton and wonders aloud "how many abortions Donald Trump was responsible for."

It's to Sweeney's credit that despite the sensational "news" broken by AKA Jane Roe, the overall effect of the movie is to make us less cynical about the woman once known as Jane Roe, an unreliable narrator and symbol-for-hire who nevertheless emerges as a very real human.

MovieStyle on 05/29/2020

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