A landmark constitutional case rested on a plaintiff found and shaped by chance.

Evidence

When Roe v. Wade was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, the plaintiff’s attorneys used the pseudonym “Jane Roe” to protect her from the social stigma of acknowledging that she was pregnant but unmarried. But 8 years after the ruling, Norma McCorvey disclosed that she was “Jane Roe”. At the time the case was initiated, McCorvey was 21. Married at 16, divorced, and the mother of a 5-year-old daughter, McCorvey felt that she could not care for another child. She claimed—falsely, she later admitted—that her pregnancy was the result of rape, hoping that would enable her to get an abortion. But Texas’s law outlawed abortions except to save the life of the mother, and McCorvey could not find a physician willing to perform an illegal abortion. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 3096

Categorization

• CANDY: Jane Roe was Norma McCorvey, who falsely claimed rape to try to obtain an abortion — a striking, tellable background fact about the most famous case in American law.
• XREF: Illustrates the abstract ‘appropriate plaintiff’ problem from the previous paragraph with a specific human case.