Over the years, we’ve all heard the back and forth between the pro-life and pro-abortion advocates, each totally convinced of the rightness of their platform.

It is one of the most hotly debated issues between the political right and left in the United States. Since the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision, around 60 million human lives have been snuffed out, as they grew in their mothers’ wombs.

The subject of the decision, Norma McCorvey, went on to become an outspoken pro-life advocate. While ashamed that her circumstance was used to spark a decision that would result in so many lost lives, she was a redeemed believer in Christ, and had hope that the landmark decision would be overturned, one day.

She was the seed of the abortion movement, but she never had an abortion.

And some of you may have already been aware. Others of you may be like me, realizing that while you know McCorvey’s back story, and how her situation was exploited for the cause of abortion advocates in 1970s Texas, and eventually, the entire nation, it hadn’t occurred to you to consider what happened to her pregnancy.

Court cases of this magnitude take time, and according to LifeNews.com, a procedural issue slowed down the Roe v. Wade case.

Because of that delay, McCorvey had already had the child by the time the Supreme Court issued its decision in January 1973. She had been adopted into a Texas home, perhaps somewhere in the Dallas area where McCorvey lived. The court nevertheless said that McCorvey’s case was not moot since her circumstances were “capable of repetition” because courts would never be able to decide the question during the time of a woman’s pregnancy.

Procedural history is never the exciting part of a lawsuit. But for McCorvey’s unborn daughter, the dry complexity of legal procedure is the reason she exists today. Fortunately for a three-year old girl, “the wheels of justice grind slowly,” and by the time the court issued its decision, a Texas family had adopted her. If the courts could have moved more quickly, she (and her family) would have never had that chance.

That daughter would be 48 years old today, and it’s unknown if she or her family realize that it was her life hanging in the balance of that horrific decision.

It’s a footnote in history. In the absence of one, desperately foul court decision, adoption was the answer, and there’s a woman out there who was given a chance because her mother blessed someone else with a child.