'This is my deathbed confession': Woman behind landmark abortion rights case was paid to change her mind

Filmed before her death in 2017, documentary reveals Norma McCormey was anti-abortion crusade's 'big fish'

Anti-abortion groups pressured the anonymous plaintiff in the landmark abortion rights case Roe vs Wade to speak out against abortion, she revealed in a documentary filmed in the months before her death.

Norma McCorvey, the case's "Jane Roe", had shocked the nation when she said she would pledge her life to "helping women save their babies" nearly 25 years after the 1972 US Supreme Court case that struck down restrictive anti-abortion laws and protected women's right to the procedure. She also wrote about her reversal in a 1998 memoir and appeared at anti-abortion demonstrations.

But her announcement was a paid stunt supported by anti-abortion organisations, she says in the FX documentary AKA Jane Roe, set to premiere on Friday. It airs on Hulu on Saturday.

"I was the big fish," she says in a clip from the film. "I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they'd put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say."

Ms McCorvey died of heart failure in February 2017. As part of her "deathbed confession" captured on film, she relayed her support for abortion rights: "If a young woman wants to have an abortion, that's no skin off my ass. That's why they call it choice."

The documentary was filmed over several months in 2016, leading up to the election of Donald Trump. Ms McCorvey supported his opponent Hillary Clinton.

"I wish I knew how many abortions Donald Trump was responsible for," Ms McCorvey says in the film. "I'm sure he's lost count, if he can count that high."

She had previously said she no longer supported abortion rights following her conversion to Evangelical Christianity, then spent several years supporting efforts to overturn the Supreme Court decision central to the movement.

The film's trailer outlines Ms McCorvey's difficult childhood — during which her family told her that her homosexuality was "dirty" — and her complicated legacy in the abortion rights movement.

She was married at 16 but was abused after revealing to her husband that she was pregnant, she says.

Her voice in the trailer says: "It was 1969, I was pregnant and I was scared. These two attorneys were looking for a plaintiff to help overturn the Texas abortion laws."

Though she helped make abortion legal, she never had the procedure — while pregnant with her third child, she signed the affidavit that challenged the state's law prohibiting abortions except in cases where it saves the mothers' life.

Operation Rescue, the militant anti-abortion group that Ms McCorvey said had paid her to publicly denounce her views, has denied her claims.

In a statement, group president Troy Newman said: "There is no way her Christian faith or her pro-life beliefs were false."

The documentary arrives in the midst of renewed attacks against the Supreme Court ruling from conservative state legislatures and the Trump administration and its allies, while officials in at least eight states have relied on coronavirus guidelines prohibiting nonelective medical procedures to halt abortion clinics.

Abortion providers in Texas, where Roe vs Wade began, were forced to stop offering services for nearly a month under the rules — the first time in decades that the state had banned legal abortions.