Norma McCorvey was never the feminist activist she was touted to be.

As the 'Roe' in 'Roe Vs Wade', McCorvey's life is a tragic tale of abuse by people happy to use her as a pawn.

Born to a deprived family in Texas, her brother was mentally unwell and her father left shortly after she was born. Identifying as bisexual but mainly lesbian from an early age she was sent to live with a relative in her teens who raped her for weeks before at 16, she married a local man Elwood McCorvey, who beat her.

She left him while pregnant with their daughter, Melissa, who was raised by McCorvey's mother.

But it was her third pregnancy, aged 22, that changed her life.

At the time Linda Coffey and Sarah Weddington, two campaigning lawyers also in theirs 20s, were looking for a very specific plaintiff to challenge Texas' abortion restrictions.

'It had to be a pregnant woman wanting to get an abortion. She couldn't have the funds to travel to California or New York for a legal abortion. And we had to have someone who could take the publicity. We weren't able to guarantee her anonymity,' Coffee later told a reporter according to Vanity Fair.

Norma McCorvey fitted the bill and unwittingly became 'Jane Roe' in a case that would shape America's history.

Already six months pregnant when the case was filed, McCorvey never had the procedure she became a spokeswoman for.

Her child was born and immediately put up for adoption before the ruling was made. But McCorvey's life was never the same.

Although she never appeared in court and was not identified during the case, she later became a pawn in the campaign for women's rights, receiving public speaking training, and living off profits from press appearances and her first autobiography I Am Roe.

But in 1995 the provocative evangelical anti-abortion Operation Rescue moved next door to where McCorvey was working at a women's clinic in Dallas.

Despite the aggressive move, McCorvey became friends with national director Flip Benham and months later was baptised a born-again Christian.

The exultant pro-life campaigners quickly set about using McCorvey to work against everything she had previously stood for.

She continued to be used as a publicity tool. Just now it was for the other side.

She switched from poster-girl of the pro-choice movement to the evangelical pin-up, despite still living with her long term lesbian partner.

In 1998 she converted again, this time to Catholicism, after meeting outspoken priest Father Frank Pavone, head of Priests for Life.

But she ended her life in obscurity, described as a 'little bit of an orphan', used by both sides.

As her biographer Joshua Prager noted in a 2013 article, she was more comfortable with foes than allies, firing and rehiring her lawyer multiple times even though he worked for her pro bono.

'Roe has been her life, but it's no longer much of a living', he wrote.

She was neither the pro-choice activist that won her fame, nor the pro-life campaigner she would become.