The Washington Times
National Weekly Edition
March 20-26, 2000
'Jane Roe' and 'Mary Doe' are going back to court
By Joyce Howard Price of the Washington Times
Two women involved in landmark cases that legalized abortion in 1973 have returned to court to support a federal class-action lawsuit that attacks the underlying premise of the cases they won nearly three decades ago.
Norma McCorvey, better known as "Jane Roe" in Roe vs. Wade, and Sandra Cano-Saucedo, who was "Mary Doe" in Doe vs. Bolton, the companion case to Roe, have joined a lawsuit designed to "give women equal protection under the law by protecting the mother-child relationship" throughout the pregnancy.
Miss McCorvey and Mrs. Cano-Saucedo -- who today oppose abortion -- appeared at a press conference in Washington on March 15 to announce they are filing friend-of-the-court briefs in a suit challenging a New Jersey law that prohibits wrongful-death lawsuits when the victim is an unborn child.
Lawyers with the Texas Justice Foundation are representing the two women.
The suit in question, Donna Santa Marie vs. Christine Todd Whitman et al., involved one young woman who at age 16 was forced to have an abortion against her will. Two other New Jersey woman say they underwent abortions without being "fully informed" of the effects are also plantiffs.
Mrs. Whitman, New Jersey's pro-choice governor, was named as the chief defendant in the lawsuit by virtue of her position as the state's chief executive. She has been mentioned as a possible running mate for Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the probable Republican presidential nominee.
"The case seeks to protect women from coercive abortions, to ensure that women are fully informed of the nature and consequences of abortion, and to give women equal protection under the law by protecting the mother-child relationship," the Texas Justice Foundation said in a statement.
Harold Cassidy, a New Jersey lawyer who is lead counsel in the Sand Marie case, said that three plaintiffs cannot sue the doctors who performed the unwanted abortions because of New Jersey's law barring wrongful-death suits against doctors responsible for in-utero deaths of babies.
"The doctors can say it doesn't matter if we were negligent, since New Jersey law creates the fiction that no baby exists" until birth, Mr. Cassidy said in an interview.
"Roe v. Wade has created an evolution in the law that cuts against the rights of mothers," he said.
In affidavits they are filing in the U.S. District Court of New Jersey, Miss McCorvey and Mrs. Can-Saucedo portrayed themselves as being "wrongfully used" by abortion-rights proponents in those early lawsuits. Both complained of being kept in the dark by their attorneys and of not really understanding what abortion is.
"This court must do what was not done in Roe v. Wade," Miss McCorvey, a Dallas resident, said in the affidavit to be filed in the New Jersey case. She said she never testified in the first case was "never invited into court."
Miss McCorvey, who, for a time worked in abortion clinics, said the federal court in New Jersey "must have a trial and make finds of fact based upon real evidence. Abortions must be publicly defined. The humanity of the child must be waived, and the mothers' real interests must be considered."
Mrs. Cano-Saucedo says in her affidavit she never sought an abortion and never had one. She was pregnant with her fourth child, and her husband was contributing little to the family's welfare when she agreed to become the lead plaintiff in Doe vs. Bolton. She said she was the only pregnant woman who was a plaintiff. Others, she said, were would-be representatives of the abortion industry.
When Mrs. Cano-Saucedo checked out the Doe vs. Bolton case file years later, she discovered that the records indicated she was suing because she had sought an abortion at a state-funded hospital in Atlanta, but was turned down.
"That was a false statement," she said in her Santa Marie affidavit. (Because of her "unstable" life at the time the Supreme Court decided the Doe vs. Bolton case, she said she "felt compelled" to give up her fourth child for adoption."
"Abortion is not in the interest of a mother. It is a false solution of a mother. It is a false solution imposed upon her by others," Mrs. Cano-Saucedo said in her affidavit.
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