Wealth & Money Quote by Norma McCorvey

Spoken by the woman known as Jane Roe in Roe v. Wade, the line lands with the force of reversal. Norma McCorvey had been the face of the legal fight that legalized abortion nationwide, then later recast herself as an opponent of it. The sentence fuses a moral judgment with an economic accusation: not only are abortions never justified, she says, but the practice is structured as a money-making scheme that sidelines the very women it claims to help.

Her reference to Dr. Jasper evokes a specific figure who crystallized her disillusionment. In her later accounts, McCorvey described encounters in clinics that felt transactional and impersonal; she sometimes used pseudonyms for doctors and staff. Calling abortion a racket channels a long-standing pro-life critique that clinics are profit-driven businesses, suggesting a betrayal of care and conscience. It also recasts her own celebrity. If the system that once used her name is now framed as exploitative, then her change of heart becomes an exposure, not a contradiction.

Yet her story is famously tangled. McCorvey never had an abortion; her pregnancies ended in adoption. She worked for clinics after Roe, then was courted by anti-abortion activists and converted to evangelical Christianity and later Catholicism. Decades on, a documentary revealed she had been paid by pro-life groups, and she hinted her public stance had been, in part, performative. Those revelations complicate how to read her charges against providers and blur the line between conviction and incentive.

Still, the power of the sentence lies in its distilled accusation of commerce over compassion. It transforms a policy debate into a moral drama populated by fallible actors, money, and wounded trust. Whether taken as genuine testimony, strategic rhetoric, or both, it captures how McCorvey came to narrate her own journey: from legal symbol to disenchanted insider, insisting that the system’s logic ran on profit rather than the welfare of women.