Consider the person, the time, and the place. She was a troubled youngster in a troubled situation -- the happiest times she remembered were apparently the time she spent in the youth home (also according to Wikipedia). She wanted an abortion, and that seemed (to her 21-year-old, not-well-raised self) to be one way to get it legally. Didn't work.
Again based on other stuff I've read, as well as Wiki, she's the kind of person who always wanted to have a family to belong to, but she wanted them to want her as much as she wanted to have one. I've had a couple of friends like that -- hugely nourished by finding religious communities, when they'd been unmoored much of their lives.
Only when you find out that the answers that are provided don't fit all the questions you have, you have to re-evaluate. Sometimes that means tossing away what came before, sometimes it means redefining the problems, spinning the "answers," or simply accepting that nothing can answer everything, and that the community is more than its ability to answer all questions and problems.
So she's an authority on herself; she may have been making a deathbed confession, or she may just have been sniping back at a perceived lack of support when she felt she needed it. Either way, her life as it was lived is her legacy -- both the abortion ruling, and her fight against it.
Damn I can get wordy. But most people have situations that are too complex to make facile one-line judgments valid, unless they're very tightly delineated.
Wendy P.