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The documentary, directed by Nick Sweeney and premiering on FX Networks and Hulu on May 22, shows McCovey, who died at of heart failure at the age of 69 in 2017, telling her complex life story.

McCorvey, who grew up in a poor and unstable home environment in Texas, gained national prominence as the plaintiff, then known as Jane Roe, in the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade.

At the age of 22, McCorvey sought an abortion in 1969 to end a pregnancy, her third by that point, during a turbulent time in her life. At that point, two attorneys represented her as the plaintiff in a case to sue Texas over its law prohibiting abortion except to save the life of the mother. The case became a class-action lawsuit and made it through the federal court system to the Supreme Court.

In a 7-2 decision in 1973, the court ruled to extend the right to privacy established under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to abortion, which meant states could not prohibit patients from accessing the procedure in the first trimester of pregnancy.

Notably, McCorvey never got an abortion herself. By the time the case was decided, her third child, who she gave up for adoption, was already a toddler.

After the watershed decision, McCorvey was out of the public eye for some time before starting to go by her real name. She became a more open advocate supporting abortion rights and working on behalf of abortion-access causes in Texas, though her complicated personal life and the inconsistent information she spread about the circumstances surrounding her pregnancy made her an imperfect figurehead for the movement.

Then in a dramatic reversal in the 1990s, McCorvey became a born-again evangelical Christian. She publicly affiliated herself with Operation Rescue, a controversial militant antiabortion group now known as Operation Save America, and vocally opposed the procedure for years.

But in what she describes in the documentary as her “deathbed confession,” McCovey characterizes her antiabortion activism as “all an act,” telling a number of friends — and the public — that she was paid to repeat antiabortion talking points, according to reviews of the documentary in The Daily Beast and the Los Angeles Times.

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