‘Roe’ Baby Identifies Herself After 51 Years of Anonymity

We now know the name of the anonymous baby that was part of the 1973 landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade.

Her name: Shelley Lynn Thornton.

Thornton identified herself to the public in a new book The Family Roe: An American Story by Joshua Prager. It will be released on Sept. 14, but an excerpt was published on Thursday in The Atlantic.

Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff in that Supreme Court case, gave Thornton up for adoption. Thornton was two years old when the high court ruled that women can legally nationwide have an abortion at least during the first trimester in which thereafter it is up to the states to decide abortion laws as long as there’s an exception for when the mother’s life is in danger. McCorvey died in 2017 at the age of 69.

Prager identified Thornton, now 51, as the “Roe baby” after purchasing papers McCorvey left with her partner, Connie Gonzales, whom she left after a decades-long relationship. Those papers helped Prager “establish the true details of” McCorvey’s life and he

found in them a reference to the place and date of birth of the Roe baby, as well as to her gender. Tracing leads, I found my way to her in early 2011. Her name has not been publicly known until now: Shelley Lynn Thornton,” wrote Prager in the excerpt in The Atlantic.

Prager continued:

I did not call Shelley. In the event that she didn’t already know that Norma McCorvey was her birth mother, a phone call could have upended her life. Instead, I called her adoptive mother, Ruth, who said that the family had learned about Norma. She confirmed that the adoption had been arranged by McCluskey. She said that Shelley would be in touch if she wished to talk.Until such a day, I decided to look for her half sisters, Melissa and Jennifer. I found and met with them in November 2012, and after I did so, I told Ruth. Shelley then called to say that she, too, wished to meet and talk. She especially welcomed the prospect of coming together with her half sisters. She told me the next month, when we met for the first time on a rainy day in Tucson, Arizona, that she also wished to be unburdened of her secret. “Secrets and lies are, like, the two worst things in the whole world,” she said. “I’m keeping a secret, but I hate it.”

Thornton coming out into the public spotlight comes amid controversy surrounding Texas’ abortion law, which

prohibits abortion after a heartbeat is detected in the fetus, which usually occurs after six weeks. It allows anyone to sue those who aid and abet an abortion and receive at least $10,000 in a civil lawsuit. The Supreme Court last week let the law stand for now.