Ms Norma McCorvey, better known as Jane Roe in the famous legal judgment which liberalised US abortion law, expects to learn within several weeks whether the US judiciary will reopen the 30-year-old case.
Ms McCorvey, now a grandmother, is determined to have the Roe vs Wade ruling reversed.
Speaking yesterday after addressing students at the Law Society of NUI Galway, Ms McCorvey said she felt she had been "used" by the pro-choice movement and was now vehemently against abortion.
On January 22nd, 1973, the US Supreme Court ruled that abortion was a right of privacy that could not be prohibited by individual states. The Roe vs Wade judgment overruled total bans on abortion in 33 US states, and aroused the ire of the Catholic Church.
The legal case took so long that Ms McCorvey, who had taken Jane Roe as a pseudonym, had the child and gave it up for adoption. She worked subsequently in abortion clinics and says she changed her view on the issue after she underwent a religious conversion more than 10 years ago.
She now wants the verdict overturned, and her lawyer expects to hear oral arguments in New Orleans on March 2nd which would determine if a review can proceed.
