Ron Reigns:
Welcome. And thank you for joining us on Birth Mother Matters In Adoption with Kelly Rourke-Scarry and me Ron Reigns, where we delve into the issues of adoption from every angle of the adoption triad.
Speaker 2:
Doing what’s best for your kid and for yourself because if you just take care of yourself, you’re definitely not going to be able to take care of that kid, and that’s not fair.
Speaker 3:
I know that my daughter would be well taken care of with them.
Speaker 4:
Don’t have an abortion. Give this child a chance.
Speaker 5:
All I could think about was needing to save my son.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
My name is Kelly Rourke-Scarry. I’m the Executive Director, President and co-founder of Building Arizona Families Adoption Agency, the Donna K. Evans Foundation, and creator of the You Before Me campaign. I have a bachelor’s degree in family studies in human development and a master’s degree in education with an emphasis in school counseling. I was adopted at the age of three days, born to a teen birth mother, raised in a closed adoption and reunited with my birth mother in 2007. I have worked in the adoption field for over 15 years.
Ron Reigns:
And I’m Ron Reigns. I’ve worked in radio since 1999. I was the co-host of two successful morning shows in Prescott, Arizona. Now I work for my wife who’s an adoption attorney, and I’m able to combine these two great passions and share them on this podcast.
Ron Reigns:
In June, 1969, 21 year old Norma McCorvey, AKA Jane Roe, discovered she was pregnant with her third child. She married and became pregnant at 16, but divorced before the child was born. She subsequently relinquished custody of her child to her mother.
Ron Reigns:
In 1967, she gave up a second child for adoption immediately after giving birth. When she became pregnant again in 1969, she wanted to have an abortion. She returned to Dallas, Texas where friends advised her to assert falsely that she had been raped in order to obtain a legal abortion with the incorrect assumption that Texas law allowed abortion in cases of rape and incest.
Ron Reigns:
The Texas statute allowed abortion only for the purpose of saving the life of the mother. Norma was referred to two female attorneys, Linda Coffee, and Sarah Weddington.
Ron Reigns:
Norma gave birth before the case was decided, and she placed her baby for adoption.
Ron Reigns:
On January 22nd, 1973, the Supreme court in a 7-2 decision legalizing abortion nationwide. In a majority opinion written by justice Harry Blackmun, the court declared that a woman’s right to an abortion was implicit in the right to privacy protected by the 14th Amendment.
Ron Reigns:
The court divided a woman’s pregnancy into three trimesters and outlined the following. The first trimester, abortion was able to be decided by the pregnant woman. Second trimester, the government could regulate abortion, although not ban it in order to protect the mother’s health. And third trimester, the state could prohibit abortion to protect a fetus that could survive on its own outside the womb, except when a woman’s health was in danger.
Ron Reigns:
The big headline out of AKA Jane Rowe is McCorvey’s assertion that she was paid by anti-abortion activists to switch her position on reproductive rights in the mid 1990s. “It was all an act,” she says in the documentary of her much ballyhooed about face, which had been attributed to her becoming a devout Christian, proclaiming herself to be a good actress.
Ron Reigns:
McCorvey, who died in 2017 at the age of 69, defiantly states that she doesn’t care what people think of her. She was, to be sure, a complicated figure, one who says she never actually had an abortion. Growing up under hardscrabble circumstances, she faced an unwanted pregnancy when she was recruited to serve as the plaintiff in the landmark case, only later shedding her anonymity to be embraced as an icon of the reproductive rights movement.
Ron Reigns:
McCorvey later shocked her allies by declaring herself born-again, switching her allegiance to the anti-abortion rights group Operation Rescue. It was only the latest wrinkle in what a news report described as the furious battle that rages around all her name has stood for.
Ron Reigns:
But not the last one. Given what she reveals during the interviews conducted over the last year of her life. Operation Save America, an anti-abortion group formerly known as Operation Rescue, has denied McCorvey was paid by that group.
Ron Reigns:
“Her whole life was an attempt to tell her real story says,” Rob Schenck in the film, an evangelical minister who made his own dramatic shift from anti-abortion crusader to supporter of rights made possible by Roe v. Wade, adding that he hopes the film creates a posthumous opportunity for her to do so.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
A Jane Rowe, I’m so glad that you recommended it to me because I think it’s going to produce a lot of hype. I know that the pro-choice side is definitely going to grab this and run with it. I’m sure a lot of pro-choice believers probably feel very vindicated, and it was absolutely not what I was expecting. I was completely and totally blown away. I had never seen an interview prior with her. She was what I had expected. It was not necessarily what I anticipated in any aspect whatsoever. What was your take on it?
Ron Reigns:
I agree with that, and I feel like, because I thought it was going to be almost completely politically driven and just focused on one side or the other, probably more of the one side. And it did have politics in it. It definitely included politics and the arguments, but it was almost more a documentary about her and her life, which I kind of appreciated because then it does let you get to know who she is.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Right. And I think that was actually smart on their part because it made her more credible from their vantage point.
Ron Reigns:
Right, I think it did too. But it also showed some of the flaws because she was a very complex person.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
She was.
Ron Reigns:
And you can’t just put her into a box and say, “Oh, she’s pro-choice. She’s pro-life, whatever,” because it was very fluid throughout her life as to what she stood for. And yeah, it was very interesting. It was a well done documentary. I
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Think it’s interesting that you say she was very complex. I think she was very complex but also very simple. I think that she did not have the ability to see both sides at the same time. And because of that, she would flip from side to side and go wherever she was benefited the most.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So I think that she was definitely a puppet for whoever was able to reach her. And to me, that’s really sad because when you think of the Jane Roe of abortion, I always envisioned a very strong, very powerful, very solid individual that what I thought was the case, basically felt that she had done something very wrong and spent her life trying to alter the case that she had previously made. And that wasn’t it at all. And so it was disappointing in that aspect.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I’m not sure really what her end goal was for making the film. I don’t know what she got from that.
Ron Reigns:
You know, I don’t know. I think she was throughout her life, I think she was very attention starved, and the people that paid attention to her, the people that gave her praise and adulation on either side, she would, she was malleable. She would form to that. She was like clay. You know?
Ron Reigns:
And so if somebody’s giving you attention and or money to speak their point of view, she was all out there getting in front of the camera and doing it.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
But again, I mean, if you take somebody who… Now I don’t believe she graduated high school, is that correct? Am I correct in that?
Ron Reigns:
I didn’t catch that.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
She got married at 16.
Ron Reigns:
It didn’t seem like it, no. Because she went to the reform school.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I don’t remember. Right. But then she got married at 16. Right? Right. Wasn’t she much younger? 17. And so, I mean, you take somebody who is presumably not fully educated, did not have a high occupational position, and somebody who was desperate for, like you said, attention and I think love and really wanting to fit in. Because where she was living growing up, she wasn’t fitting in with her family and her mom.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And then she was sent to reform school and because she was interested in girls again, she is then cast out again because she’s not fitting in with the general society.
Ron Reigns:
Right with norms.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Especially in those days. And so I think that she was really looking for something. And unfortunately I think she was played like a puppet on both sides.
Ron Reigns:
I agree.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
It was not at all what I was expecting. Was it what you were expecting?
Ron Reigns:
I don’t think so, but maybe that’s because all I had heard about it was the big revelation at the end. So I didn’t realize that it was going to go through her entire life as an individual and how she changed through her life back and forth. And so, no, that wasn’t quite.
Ron Reigns:
I thought it was going to almost just start right at the Roe v. Wade controversy and through the decision. I thought it would start there, but they went back further, went into her family background a little bit, which I appreciated that. But no, it was not at all what I expected.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So I think I was expecting definitely more, like you said. I thought there was going to be a lot more about the court case. I didn’t realize she really had very, very minimal involvement in the actual court proceedings. By then she had had the baby and placed the baby for adoption. And so, it was a couple years later that the ruling came out.
Ron Reigns:
Right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So she really wasn’t a huge participant in the trial, the movement. It was more her name, which was then reclassified as Jane Roe, and really just this individual. And they used her as an example as to why women, they felt that women should be entitled to have an abortion.
Ron Reigns:
Right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So that was really… I mean, like I said, her actual involvement I think was very minimal to some aspect.
Ron Reigns:
Right, and she even said that she found out about the decision like everybody else from the paper, and then the attorney called and said, “We won.” And she said, “Well, you won. I had the baby.”
Ron Reigns:
And it was interesting. So yeah. And she was being played.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
It was interesting.
Ron Reigns:
Played the whole time by both sides. So I can’t emphasize that enough.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yeah, and that was really sad to me because I don’t think that she really… I mean, that was her third pregnancy.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yeah. I thought it was very tragic actually. And again, for me, my entire life because I was adopted, I’ve heard so much about Roe vs Wade, Roe vs Wade. I mean, being in the adoption world, it’s a huge, huge topic. And to see this documentary was really disappointing, not in the documentary itself, but in the reality of what it was.
Ron Reigns:
Right. And who she ended up when you actually put a face to the name. And also I, as I was watching, I often wondered about you and how you were perceiving this because the way she spoke and her mannerisms, and almost kind of like not caring what anybody thought of her personally, I thought of your mom a lot from the stories you’ve told. Did she remind you of your mom in any ways?
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
There were a couple aspects to where she did remind me of my mom. My mom dropped out of school in the 10th grade. My mom had me at 16. My mom was definitely feminine. She wasn’t homosexual at all. She was very feminine. After she had had me, she went on, and this made me smile. My mom worked as a car hop on roller skates at a fast food place, as well.
Ron Reigns:
As did Jane Roe. Right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yeah. And so that was a little ironic. My mom did not care, yes, what people thought of her. She was who she was and you could accept her or not. But she wasn’t as… You know, I think Norma was very into the shock. I mean the hair colors and she would go to these extremes. My mom didn’t do that, but my mom very much like her was into the rings. My mom always had a ton of rings like that. And I think her personality where she was really looking to be loved and find where she fit in was very reflective of my mother as well.
Ron Reigns:
Now I want to go back on a couple of things. First of all, I didn’t know there were different hair colors until you just said that. What colors were her hair through the documentary?
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Brown and then bright red and then a darker shade of red. And then it would be more of like a politically correct hairstyle. And then she’d go back to the shocking red and the real short butch look. And I found that that was very indicative of where she was at the moment. Like if she was on the pro-choice side, she seemed to be-
Ron Reigns:
Little more flamboyant.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yeah. Yeah.
Ron Reigns:
Right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And-
Ron Reigns:
And when she was on the pro-life side, she was more conservative looking, had a more conservative haircut.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I never realized that Gloria Allred was working with her.
Ron Reigns:
Right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Did you know that?
Ron Reigns:
Well, I didn’t know much about Jane Roe other than, obviously I knew the name. I knew of the case. I’d never seen her on TV, never seen her speak before, so this was very eye opening in a lot of ways, but it doesn’t surprise me that Gloria Allred was her friend, and they worked together so much, but I didn’t know it.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Okay. Yeah, I thought that was very interesting.
Ron Reigns:
See, you bring up something that I think makes her seem like more of a complex person in that she always did. She craved that attention, acceptance, and love, and all that stuff. But on the other hand, like you said, she didn’t care what you thought of what she said. She would say brash things all the time, and she didn’t care if you liked it or not. So I feel like that really, it’s kind of a dichotomy between her personalities. I just find very… That’s why I think she was a very complex person. That’s why I say that, but she was in many ways, a very simple person as well. So it’s strange.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Right. I can definitely see where you’re coming from. I think that she is also very much a result of society. She didn’t didn’t have a close relationship with her mom. She didn’t finish school, I don’t believe. She kept getting pregnant by different men, and yet she identified being a homosexual.
Ron Reigns:
Being a lesbian, right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So it was just interesting. Yeah. Originally going into this, I believed that we would be having a discussion right now about how the directors of the movie had preyed upon her and got her to do this deathbed confession before she passed so that they could vindicate themselves. And so-
Ron Reigns:
And try and undo the last 20 years that she had done or whatever, right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And so when I saw that that was not the case, I thought, okay, so where would I go with this? And then I thought, you know, really people’s events in their lives are often part of the reason why they change their opinions, why they go back and forth.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I think that people do make major life choices and decisions based upon happenings. So in other words, someone could identify with one religion and then meet somebody and fall in up with them and change to their religion because they want to identify with them.
Ron Reigns:
Right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And they’ll be positive reinforcement by identifying with that religion rather than their previous one. So I think that in high school, my daughter was telling me that a lot of the high school kids are absolutely pro-choice, and they think it’s cool to be pro-choice. And they will say, “Oh no, definitely women have the right to choose,” and really jump on that.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And as they get older, those opinions may change. And so I think that what we saw is a woman who went back and forth. And I believe that at the time that she made those transitions, she herself believed that.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Do I think that she was fully acting? No, I don’t. I think that she was swayed and then forced herself to believe what they wanted her to. So I think that she was very much a puppet, but I think Norma at the same time was not able to make her own significant decisions in that aspect. And so she was coerced by the left side and the right side to believe what they wanted her to believe.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So when she was speaking, I do believe that she believed what she was saying at that moment. Now that may not have been her actual belief, but in that moment, that’s where she felt vindicated and validated. And she went where she felt she would get the most attention, like you had said, and the most praise and what benefited her the most.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And so I think that there’s something called a confirmation bias as well, which is the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and rejects the information that contradicts them.
Ron Reigns:
Right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
An example for all of us in today’s society would be, you can look on the news, and you can see people who are going out to the grocery stores, and they’re wearing masks and gloves and following the orders and recommendations by the CDC. You also see the rebels that are going to the store, and they’re not wearing masks, and they’re not wearing gloves, and they are telling everybody this is-
Ron Reigns:
A big hoax. Right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
… a conspiracy, it’s a big hoax. They’re blowing it out of proportion. This is due to the upcoming election. And so they are rejecting any information that contradicts their own ideology, what they want to believe.
Ron Reigns:
And I think that people on both sides, whichever it would be, like if you’re out there wearing a mask and trying to do everything, you’re watching one source of news, for instance, whereas a lot of these others are watching alternative sources on the internet and getting their medical advice from different sources I’ll say.
Ron Reigns:
I will give one more reputation over another, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. But you’re right. There is confirmation bias, and I think we’re all susceptible to it. And that’s why I’ve always recommended for instance to my son, watch CNN and MSNBC and Fox a little bit of each. And then what you do is when they tell the facts, if all the facts are the same in all three, those are the facts.
Ron Reigns:
Now, all the other stuff is opinion, and you kind of mesh those and go, okay, what do I believe hearing these three different voices or how many ever you listen to, the more, the better I think.
Ron Reigns:
But if you just only watch Fox News or you only watch MSNBC, they’re only getting that one side, and that is confirmation bias.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Absolutely, and that’s what I think that she was doing as well along with she felt truly cared when Flip came out, when he moved into the office next to her and took that time and brought her to this religion. I think that she embraced it because she felt loved by them.
Ron Reigns:
Right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And she felt-
Ron Reigns:
Because he was to her at first, and then they welcomed her in. And so, yeah, I don’t think it was 100% them paying her to do anything. They were manipulating her by all means. But I think it started out with her feeling accepted.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I agree, and I think a really good way to quantify that would be, I would seriously doubt, and this is speculation, purely speculation. I would seriously doubt that in that first conversation, he opened up his checkbook and said, “Let’s talk.”
Ron Reigns:
Right. Exactly, exactly.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And so what I took away from the documentary is there was a woman that was manipulated in not just a financial manner, but emotionally, mentally. And she was put on the forefront of something that she probably had no idea what this was going to involve, but like evolved into. And I think that she really probably got in over her head at many points in her life.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And at the same time, she was probably all along trying to find out who she really was. And that’s why she kept putting on so many hats.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I think it’s very sad because her life in lot of ways is tragic. I don’t know that she would look back at her life and say, “Yes, I had a great life. I’m happy with the way my life went.”
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I think that we can all appreciate her struggle and her openness to share her story because it may help others down the road.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I do think that this would definitely be a win for the pro-choice side in terms of the documentary. I know people were saying, “Oh, this is propaganda and all that.” No, I believed it.
Ron Reigns:
Right. I think it was one sided, certainly, and it was told from a perspective, but I don’t think that was too heavy handed or…I think they were being as honest as they could be with the information they had. I agree with you 100%.
Ron Reigns:
And I also felt like it really brought me back because a lot of this took place in around 1987, 88, and the early nineties before she converted. And I saw the people that were protesting on the pro-life side, and I found it in a lot of ways, distasteful, and I thought, that’s not how you win hearts and minds.
Ron Reigns:
I think you win hearts and minds by having an honest conversation with somebody and trying to see where they’re coming from and why. And then somewhere you’ve got to have a discussion as opposed to just yelling at somebody, “You’re a baby killer.” I don’t think that’s going to help anybody. I think that just reinforces your echo chamber where you’re saying, “Oh, they’re all baby killers,” but it’s not changing anybody else’s mind.
Ron Reigns:
That’s my opinion of this. That’s a lot of my takeaway. And it made me think of when I was that young, and I went through my experience, maybe that was a little of me going, I don’t really want to associate with that side. And so I didn’t push back as hard as I should. Does that make sense?
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yeah, it does. And what you said is actually very interesting because one thing that I was sharing with my daughter as she and I were watching this was when they were showing when they were protesting, like you said, in the very early nineties, and they had the big boards up of the abortion pictures.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I remember, I went to ASU, and I remember seeing those protestors at ASU. They were at ASU. Nobody was getting an abortion at ASU, but they were doing their protests and so forth.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And I remember thinking, yeah, I remember that. I remember those boards. I remember seeing those. And what you described in terms of talking to somebody and really investing in them emotionally and mentally is very much what Flip did when he got her to convert basically.
Ron Reigns:
Right. Yeah, when he approached her on that bench, he wasn’t yelling at her. They had an honest conversation.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And all the other times where he would do these drastic measures and those weren’t working. But you’re right. The one time that he said, “Hey, let’s talk,” and sat down and gave her time and attention, that’s what worked.
Ron Reigns:
And I hope in some weird way, that’s what we’re doing with this podcast is having a conversation, not yelling at people or judging for past decisions, or what their choices are, but kind of saying, “Hey, here’s a different perspective. Take a look and I’ll take a look at yours.”
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yeah. I think my final comment on this documentary is a question that I’m expected to be asked will be how will this affect the court’s decisions and the upcoming court cases regarding abortion today and whether or not it’s going to be overturned?
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I don’t think it will be influential at all. I don’t think one person’s stance or viewpoint that actually had very… She was a representative of the women who wanted an abortion. It was not solely just her. She was just the front man basically. And so I don’t think that her life story or her opinion is going to significantly weigh into the court’s decision in 2020.
Ron Reigns:
I agree 100%. Like I said, I think it was well done. It was interesting, and it did keep me fascinated pretty much the whole way through, but it didn’t change my mind. And I don’t think it’ll change anybody’s mind on either side.
Ron Reigns:
Just because one person on her deathbed confession says that this happened or so and so paid me to do this, and that’s the only reason I did it, in a way to me that doesn’t matter at all. It only matters what right and wrong is before any of this took place.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And hopefully everyone else who’s listening will take away from our conversation just as the movie and take it for what it’s or the documentary, take it for what it’s worth and do your own research. And that’s one of the reasons I started the You Before Me campaign because I wanted to give an outlet where people could go and just learn more about what it is and what it isn’t and go from there and make their own decisions.
Ron Reigns:
Thank you for joining us on Birth Mother Matters in Adoption. If you’re listening and you’re dealing with an unplanned pregnancy and want more information about adoption, Building Arizona Families is a local Arizona adoption agency and available 24/7 by phone or text at 623-695-4112. That’s 623-695-4112.
Ron Reigns:
We can make an immediate appointment with you to get started on creating an Arizona adoption plan, or just get you more information.
Ron Reigns:
You can also find out more information about Building Arizona Families on their website at AZpregnancyhelp.com.
Ron Reigns:
Thanks also go out to Grapes for allowing us to use their song I Don’t Know as our theme song. Birth Mother Matters in Adoption was written and produced by Kelly Rourke-Scarry and edited by me.
Ron Reigns:
Please rate and review this podcast wherever you’re listening to us. We’d really appreciate it.
Ron Reigns:
We also now have a website at birthmothermatterspodcast.com. Tune in next time on Birth Mother Matters in Adoption for Kelly Rourke-Scarry, I’m Ron Reigns.