AN ICON IN SEARCH MODE

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Norma McCorvey, in her 1994 book I Am Roe, described a feminist leader's visit to the Dallas women's clinic where McCorvey toiled as a volunteer. Intimidated by the woman's success and poise, McCorvey tried to salvage her own sense of importance by revealing what she had told few others: "I'm the Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade." The woman, wrote McCorvey, "smiled and shook her head. 'No, no,' she said. 'I know who Jane Roe is. She wouldn't be here doing this kind of work.'"

There are a lot of things McCorvey has done and been that Jane Roe's millions of admirers probably wish she hadn't. Until she unmasked herself publicly in 1989, they could imagine Roe as noble and steadfast, embattled yet triumphant. They didn't envision a former drug addict and dealer; someone so spiritually needy that she ran through religions as if channel surfing; someone testy enough to (in the presence of a Texas Monthly reporter) invite a critic who accused her of killing babies to "bring yours over here and we'll do them too."

And Jane Roe would never, never have done what McCorvey did last week: defect. On Tuesday she quit her job at Dallas' A Choice For Women clinic. On Thursday she announced that she had been baptized in a swimming pool by none other than Flip Benham, head of the antiabortion group Operation Rescue. She said she would be an Operation Rescue volunteer, "serving the Lord and helping women save babies." Said Sarah Weddington, one of the lawyers who recruited McCorvey and took Roe v. Wade to the Supreme Court: "When I first heard about it, I had to sit down."

Weddington should not have been so stunned. McCorvey was always a Roe of convenience. Weddington and then partner Linda Coffee had already planned a legal challenge to the nation's abortion laws and were trolling for a plaintiff when, in 1970, they met the ex-carnival barker who told of having been gang-raped and being unable to end her pregnancy because of Texas law. McCorvey always resented the fact that Roe was resolved too late for her to abort--she gave up the child--and that she was so far out of the loop that she learned of the Supreme Court victory from newspapers.

But for 16 years she kept a low profile--in part to protect her privacy and in part because, as she would later admit, the famous pregnancy had actually resulted from romance, not rape. But even after going public in 1989 to help fight the Supreme Court nomination of anti-Roe judge Robert Bork, she felt ill-matched with her supposed sisters, who managed to throw a 20th anniversary party for Roe v. Wade in Washington two years ago without inviting her. "I never fit in that well with the pro-choice people," she says, in her northeast Dallas home."I shoot from the hip; I don't have a degree from Vassar. I have worked in three clinics trying to please everyone and trying to be hard-core pro-choice. That is a very heavy burden."

Despite her years of work in clinics, she says she had never witnessed a second-trimester abortion until earlier this year. "It's shocking," she says, "and I got nauseous." Never one to shy from drama, the woman famous for not having an abortion put her feet in the stirrups and imagined what it would be like. "I said, 'Oh, God, what have I been doing?' From that moment I could not bring myself to go into the back of the clinic again."

Last March Benham moved Operation Rescue's national headquarters into the same small building that houses McCorvey's clinic. After some recrimination, the two bonded, and she told him of her doubts. By May she was doing odd jobs around Operation Rescue's offices. Then last month seven-year-old Emily Mackey, the daughter of the office manager, invited the woman she now calls "Auntie" to church, and McCorvey accepted Jesus Christ.

Many antiabortionists certainly hope McCorvey's conversion is, in the words of Bill Price, president of Texans United For Life, "a defining point in the history of the battle against abortion." But as Weddington (who, tellingly, still refers to McCorvey as "Jane Roe") points out, Roe was a class action, and presumably not all of the people McCorvey represented have made the same journey as she. Moreover, if she does go on to work for Benham, McCorvey will undoubtedly be the first volunteer in Operation Rescue history to support a woman's right to a first-trimester abortion.

It is always possible that under Benham's influence, McCorvey will move to a sharper antiabortion stance. She says her new friends are praying for that. They will also have to come to terms with her 26-year live-in relationship with a woman. "Norma will be set free from it," Benham has said, possibly indicating that McCorvey's new mentors, like her old ones, have their own agenda for her.

For now she is charting her own course, coming to a position that accepts the need to allow early abortions while still mightily troubled at what they entail. In so doing, the real Jane Roe may have moved from denoting one side in a landmark case to representing the real, conflicted feelings that polls say are those of a majority of Americans.

--Reported by S.C. Gwynne/Dallas and Hilary Hylton/Austin

With reporting by S.C. GWYNNE/DALLAS AND HILARY HYLTON/AUSTIN