Norma Leah McCorvey (who also went by Helen Thorpe or Jane Roe) was an activist living in Houston. In 1963, she was 16, got married, and soon had her first child. As time went on she developed a drug problem and, at the age of 19, she was pregnant again. She was 21 when she became pregnant for the third time through an affair. Her family, disgusted, left her alone, broken, and traumatized. She talked to a secretary at work who, after hearing her story, recommended an free illegal abortion clinic in Oak Cliff Texas. To her horror she found the clinic raided by the police, deserted, and blood stains on the walls. This was not abnormal for abortions in the early to mid 1900s. The illegal abortion clinic in Oak Cliff was normal for woman who had to seek an underground abortion. Luckily Norma McCorvey was found by Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee who…show more content… They went off of the the peoples’ concern of ‘immigrant amalgamation’, claiming that “they wanted to prevent “untrained” practitioners, including midwives, apothecaries, and homeopaths,” from performing abortions, but not solely for the safety of their patients. Their motives were avaricious than that. These ‘untrained practitioners’ were also competition to these doctors. Doctores wanted to give themselves the ability to be the sole people able to give abortions, giving them all the power and money that would come with it. Doctores got away such a heinous act by starting associations, such as the American Medical Association that argued abortions were both immoral and dangerous. In a mere three years after its conception, all but one state had criminalizes abortions with the exception if bearing the child would threaten a woman's life. The idea was that every woman who wanted an abortion would have to pay to go the physician to get an expert opinion. If they are approved, they would then have to pay for the
