Jane Roe made history 25 years ago last Thursday when the US Supreme Court, in Roe v Wade, ruled that she was entitled to an abortion under the constitution. Until then most states outlawed abortion, although a few allowed it for cases involving rape and incest.
There have been about 31 million legal abortions in the US since then but Jane Roe now regrets that she helped to bring them about.
Pro-choice proponents say that without the decision there would have been just as many illegal abortions, resulting in more deaths of mothers because of the lack of proper medical care.
Jane Roe is really Norma McCorvey. She feared the publicity that her case would bring so her lawyers used a pseudonym. She never appeared in court. She never had an abortion and her baby was brought to term and adopted three years before the Supreme Court decision.
Henry Wade is real. He was the Texas district attorney who defended the state's antiabortion laws.
This week there has been an outpouring of media articles and interviews on the effects of the Roe case on America over the past 25 years and whether it will be overturned. Abortion is a hot political as well as religious issue in the US and has split the Republican Party, now controlled by the Christian Coalition in many states in the south and south west.
The Republican-controlled Congress will try soon to overturn President Clinton's veto on a law to ban what is called partial birth abortion.
The Roe case, incidentally, led to the first abortion referendum in Ireland in 1983. The anti-abortion group of the time feared that the Irish Supreme Court would be influenced by its US counterpart and hand down a similar ruling based on the right to privacy if confronted with a hard case involving rape or incest.
Hence it was considered important to take the decision out of the judges' hands.
Today Norma McCorvey would like to see the US decision overturned, as she told Larry King in an interview this week, but she does not want a return to the days of backstreet abortions and high maternal death rates.
A forthcoming book and documentary film will record how she converted to active Christianity in 1995 and to a pro-life stand.
In testimony before a Senate panel this week commemorating the 25th anniversary, she told the senators that the historic decision was based on a "little lie" that she had been gang-raped.
"I was the most willing dupe" of abortion rights advocates, she told the panel. "I am dedicated to spending the rest of my life undoing the law that bears my name."
But Ms McCorvey is not correct. Her legal team was never convinced of her gang rape story and was careful to exclude rape from the pleadings that she was entitled to an abortion. She did not reveal the lie about rape until an interview in 1987.
She worked for a while after the 1973 decision in an abortion clinic in Dallas, the city where she had tried to have an illegal abortion in 1969 but failed.
Ms McCorvey's life changed when she met a clergyman, the Rev Philip Benham. He confronted her at a signing of her first book, I Am Roe, and accused her of the death of 35 million babies.
He later apologised for his outburst and opened an Operation Rescue anti-abortion centre next door to her clinic. He baptised her in August 1995, the day "Jane Roe died" as she puts it, and she reversed her views on abortion.
The film documentary called Roe vs Roe: Baptism by Fire opens with Ms McCorvey saying she is a "a former lesbian, a former pro-abort, a former lot of things." Since 1992 she has had a celibate relationship with her housemate, Ms Connie Gonzalez.
In her new book, Won By Love, Ms McCorvey says, "To be honest, I had grown tired of the homosexual lifestyle." She does not believe she was born a lesbian.
"It should be obvious to any straight-thinking person that most `lesbians' don't experience three problem pregnancies as I had. But the truth is I finally got so frustrated with men that I thought: "at least with women, I can't get pregnant."
Now Ms McCorvey wants to open a crisis centre for pregnant women. She has worked for several years for Operation Rescue, an antiabortion organisation some members of which took part in violent attacks on abortion clinics and staff.
The documentary film shows some of this violence, including the killing of a doctor by a man who considered his action "justifiable homicide".
Various attempts have been made over the 25 years to have the Supreme Court decision overturned. But although the court has become more conservative, it has refused to reverse the 1973 ruling.
However, it has approved some restrictions on abortion clinics introduced by individual states, and withdrawal of federal funding.
Pro-choice advocates see this as a chipping away at the Jane Roe judgment. They point out that the ban on federal funding means that poorer women have less access to abortion than wealthier ones.
Jane Roe may not exist any more but that landmark decision does.