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Last March Benham moved Operation Rescue's national headquarters into the same small building that houses McCorvey's clinic. After some recrimination, the two bonded, and she told him of her doubts. By May she was doing odd jobs around Operation Rescue's offices. Then last month seven-year-old Emily Mackey, the daughter of the office manager, invited the woman she now calls "Auntie" to church, and McCorvey accepted Jesus Christ.
Many antiabortionists certainly hope McCorvey's conversion is, in the words of Bill Price, president of Texans United For Life, "a defining point in the history of the battle against abortion." But as Weddington (who, tellingly, still refers to McCorvey as "Jane Roe") points out, Roe was a class action, and presumably not all of the people McCorvey represented have made the same journey as she. Moreover, if she does go on to work for Benham, McCorvey will undoubtedly be the first volunteer in Operation Rescue history to support a woman's right to a first-trimester abortion.
It is always possible that under Benham's influence, McCorvey will move to a sharper antiabortion stance. She says her new friends are praying for that. They will also have to come to terms with her 26-year live-in relationship with a woman. "Norma will be set free from it," Benham has said, possibly indicating that McCorvey's new mentors, like her old ones, have their own agenda for her.
For now she is charting her own course, coming to a position that accepts the need to allow early abortions while still mightily troubled at what they entail. In so doing, the real Jane Roe may have moved from denoting one side in a landmark case to representing the real, conflicted feelings that polls say are those of a majority of Americans.
--Reported by S.C. Gwynne/Dallas and Hilary Hylton/Austin