"In McCorvey’s version of her meeting with both Coffee and Weddington at Colombo’s, she recalls a number of details that contradict or add additional dimensions to Faux’s heroic account, primarily with regard to her sexuality and class identity. Her recollection of the two lawyer’s outfits amplifies the class difference between herself and the two women. Coffee and Weddington both wore “two-piece business suits” while McCorvey wore jeans, a “button-down shirt tied at the waist,” and “a bandanna [sic] tied around my left leg, above the knee” to indicate that she “didn’t have a girlfriend.” McCorvey’s casual use of a variation on the hanky code, a system for signifying sexual availability that flourished in the gay community during the 1970s, was only one of the ways in which she expressed her non-normative sexuality to the lawyers. When asked about her own life, she opened up to them about her lesbian relationships and past marriage to the abusive Woody McCorvey. In McCorvey’s telling, she only claimed that she had been raped upon sensing the lawyer’s discomfort with her sexual history. Desperate to regain their good faith, she used this story as an attempt to save face and depict herself as the sort of woman who was deserving of an abortion."
Roe v. Wade

January 1, 1970

Quote Details

Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Added on April 10, 2026
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English

Sources

p.18

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade