Parenting & Family Quote by Norma McCorvey

The line lands like an unguarded backstage confession: blunt, messy, and strategically ordinary. McCorvey isn’t offering a polished argument about abortion; she’s painting a scene where the moral drama has been flattened into customer service. “Patients would come in” frames the clinic like a routine marketplace. “Well, my baby is going to have a cleft palate” is presented as a casual justification, the kind you might offer for returning a defective product. Her reply, “that’s not a reason,” reads less like policy than like instinctive pushback - a moment of personal judgment intruding on what’s supposed to be clinical neutrality.

The subtext is a fight over who gets to define necessity. By choosing a cleft palate - a correctable, non-lethal condition - she spotlights abortion for fetal anomaly as emblematic of a culture drifting from crisis to preference. The sting comes from the quick pivot to “And the doctor would do the abortion,” which makes her objection feel irrelevant. Authority wins; the system proceeds. In two sentences, she stages a hierarchy: patient desire, staff discomfort, physician power.

Context matters because McCorvey (the “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade) later became a celebrity convert for the anti-abortion movement, and this quote carries that afterlife. It’s calibrated to suggest not only that abortions happen for “small” reasons, but that conscience inside the clinic is overridden by routine. The anecdote works rhetorically because it’s not a manifesto - it’s a snapshot of normalization, told in the plain language of someone claiming she has seen the machine from the inside.