{"id":176551,"date":"2020-05-19T07:02:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-19T12:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/05\/19\/this-is-my-shocked-face\/"},"modified":"2020-05-19T07:02:00","modified_gmt":"2020-05-19T12:02:00","slug":"this-is-my-shocked-face","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/05\/19\/this-is-my-shocked-face\/","title":{"rendered":"This is My Shocked Face"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Norma McCorvey, aka Jane Roe, in whose name Roe v. Wade<\/i> was filed, and who, for the past 20 some odd years, has been a poster-child for the people who want to criminalize abortion, has it was all a lie she was paid to make by the Christian right<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In its final 20 minutes, the documentary film AKA Jane Roe<\/i> delivers quite the blow to conservatives who have weaponized the story of Jane Roe herself\u2014real name, Norma McCorvey\u2014to argue that people with uteruses should have to carry any and all pregnancies to term. <\/span>

<\/span> McCorvey, who died in 2017, became Jane Roe when, as a young homeless woman, she was unable to get a legal or safe abortion in the state of Texas. Her willingness to lend her experience to the legal case for abortion led to the passing of <\/a>Roe v. Wade<\/a><\/i> in 1973<\/a>, which legalized abortions in all 50 states (though red states do all they can to get around this; recently, several have even used the COVID-19 pandemic to make abortions functionally impossible to procure<\/a>). But conservatives had a field day in the mid ’90s when the assertive, media-savvy pro-choice advocate and activist McCorvey became an anti-abortion born-again ex-gay Christian with the help of leaders of the evangelical Christian right, Reverend Flip Benham (of the infamous Operation Rescue) and Reverend Rob Schenck. A conservative film, Roe v. Wade<\/a><\/i>, starring Jon Voight<\/a> and Stacey Dash<\/a>, will dramatize McCorvey\u2019s \u201cconversion.\u201d <\/span>

<\/span> But those filmmakers, and the rest of the pro-life evangelical community, have another curveball coming. In the final third of director Nick Sweeney\u2019s 79-minute documentary, featuring many end-of-life reflections from McCorvey\u2014who grew up queer, poor, and was sexually abused by a family member her mother sent her to live with after leaving reform school\u2014the former Jane Roe admits that her later turn to the anti-abortion camp as a born-again Christian was \u201call an act.\u201d <\/span>

<\/span> \u201cThis is my deathbed confession,\u201d she chuckles, sitting in a chair in her nursing home room, on oxygen. Sweeney asks McCorvey, \u201cDid [the evangelicals] use you as a trophy?\u201d \u201cOf course,\u201d she replies. \u201cI was the Big Fish.\u201d \u201cDo you think you would say that you used them?\u201d Sweeney responds. \u201cWell,\u201d says McCorvey, \u201cI think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they took me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say. That\u2019s what I\u2019d say.\u201d She even gives an example of her scripted anti-abortion lines. \u201cI\u2019m a good actress,\u201d she points out. \u201cOf course, I\u2019m not acting now.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span> \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span> Reverend Schenck, the much more reasonable of the two evangelical leaders featured in the film, also watches the confession and is taken aback. But he\u2019s not surprised, and easily corroborates, saying, \u201cI had never heard her say anything like this\u2026 But I knew what we were doing. And there were times when I was sure she knew. And I wondered, Is she playing us?<\/i> What I didn\u2019t have the guts to say was, because I know damn well we\u2019re playing her.<\/i>\u201d Reverend Schenck admits that McCorvey was \u201ca target,\u201d a \u201cneedy\u201d person in need of love and protection, and that \u201cas clergy,\u201d people like Schenck and Benham were \u201cused to those personalities\u201d and thus easily able to exploit her weaknesses. He also confirms that she was \u201ccoached on what to say\u201d in her anti-abortion speeches. Benham denies McCorvey was paid; Schenck insists she was, saying that \u201cat a few points, she was actually on the payroll, as it were.\u201d AKA Jane Roe <\/i>finds documents disclosing at least $456,911 in \u201cbenevolent gifts\u201d from the anti-abortion movement to McCorvey.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, the anti-abortion terrorists and their pet were running a scam on each other, and on the American public.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Norma McCorvey, aka Jane Roe, in whose name Roe v. Wade was filed, and who, for the past 20 some odd years, has been a poster-child for the people who want to criminalize abortion, has it was all a lie she was paid to make by the Christian right: In its final 20 minutes, the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[551,364,387,374],"class_list":["post-176551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-abortion","tag-evil","tag-hypocrisy","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176551"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}