Personal Life
McCorvey was born in Simmesport, Louisiana, and raised in Houston, Texas as a Jehovah's Witness. McCorvey's father left the family when she was 13 years old and her parents subsequently divorced. She and her older brother were raised by their mother Mildred, a violent alcoholic. McCorvey's father died on September 27, 1995. She is of partial Cajun and Cherokee ancestry.
McCorvey dropped out of high school at the age of 14. Two years later, she married Woody McCorvey (born 1940), but left him after he abused her. She moved in with her mother and gave birth to her first child, Cheryl (born 1965). The following year, McCorvey again became pregnant and gave birth to a baby that was placed for adoption. She then returned to live with her mother, but when Norma intimated that she was sexually attracted to women, her mother disowned her and took custody of Norma's daughter, Cheryl.
Read more about this topic: Norma McCorvey
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Allow me, whom Fortune always desires to bury, lay down my life in these final trivialities. Many have freely died in longlasting loves, among whose number may the earth cover me as well.”
—Propertius Sextus (c. 5016 B.C.)