Parenting & Family Quote by Norma McCorvey

A tidy, commonsense-sounding moral offer is doing heavy political work here: if “these children can be wanted,” then the messy question of bodily autonomy gets reframed as a logistics problem with a feel-good solution. McCorvey’s phrasing borrows the language of consumer choice (“wanted children”) and social progress (“we live in a society today”), as if modernity itself has solved the hard parts. The line is engineered to make opposition to abortion sound less like coercion and more like compassion plus paperwork.

The subtext is a quiet swap of protagonists. The pregnant person recedes; “this child” becomes the central figure, then almost an object that can be “kept” or passed along. Adoption is positioned as a moral safety valve that neutralizes the stakes of pregnancy by relocating responsibility to “plenty of young couples.” That abundance claim matters: it paints an adoption market so robust that carrying to term becomes, implicitly, a civic courtesy.

Context sharpens the intent. McCorvey isn’t just any celebrity; she was “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade, later publicly aligning with anti-abortion activism. Her authority comes from biography, and the quote leans on that conversion narrative: the former symbol of abortion rights now testifying that society offers better options. It’s rhetorically effective because it sounds humane while sidestepping the physical, economic, and psychological costs of pregnancy itself. The sentence offers comfort to listeners who want a clean moral outcome without confronting the coercive mechanisms required to produce it.