Faith & Spirit Quote by Norma McCorvey

Spoken by Norma McCorvey, the original Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade, the line repudiates the pro-choice slogan by asserting divine ownership of the human body. The appeal is theological: if the body is a gift from God, then autonomy becomes stewardship rather than possession. Agency is not erased, but reframed as responsibility to a giver whose will sets the moral horizon. The sentence structure mirrors this move. It starts with a flat negation of the slogan, repeats it for emphasis, then offers the grounding premise: you got that from God. The second-person address turns a political claim into a personal admonition, and the gift language shifts the debate from rights to obligations.

Coming from McCorvey, the message carries layered irony. She was the plaintiff whose case helped legalize abortion nationwide, later converted to Christianity and Catholicism, and became a prominent anti-abortion voice. Her public shift let pro-life advocates recast a central protagonist of Roe as a witness against it. Later revelations about money and messaging muddied perceptions of her sincerity, but the line endures because it encapsulates a core pro-life conviction: human life and the body are not self-originating, and moral authority comes from beyond individual preference.

The claim also exposes a fault line in American pluralism. As a legal matter, bodily autonomy and privacy are argued within constitutional frameworks. McCorvey’s assertion bypasses that arena and goes straight to metaphysical first principles. For those who accept divine sovereignty, it is decisive; for those who do not, it can sound like an attempt to collapse public policy into sectarian doctrine. That divide explains both the slogan’s punch and its limits. By insisting the body is not owned but entrusted, it calls for humility about power over life, while simultaneously challenging a culture that grounds legitimacy in personal choice.