AKA Jane Roe [View all]

The film just finished on FX and will be repeated right now for the west coast audience. If you didn't catch this yet, do watch it.

There were a few surprises on the way. I did remember how she was given the cold shoulder by the largely white suburban pro choice organizers because she was a rotten poster girl--poor, ignorant, dragged up rather than brought up, had her kids taken away due to drugs and alcohol, and so forth, not to mention she was also lesbian, something a lot of early mainstream feminists wanted swept under the rug.

What I didn't expect was a former right to lifer honcho who admitted that she was probably playing them for money, but that the antichoice people were playing her just as hard, that the long lasting conversion in this story seems to be her conversion of him.

She was a complicated person with a messy life. When the story broke last week, I read one poster's opinion that she belonged in hell for damaging the pro choice movement. I answered that I thought she'd already been there. This film proved me right.

She was one of us. She set the record straight before her death. RIP, Norma, you've earned it.