The Family Roe: An American Story by Joshua Prager

Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction Finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 A New York Times Notable Book of 2021 One of TIME's 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 A masterpiece of reporting on the Supreme Court's most divisive case, Roe v. Wade, and the unknown lives at its heart. Despite her famous pseudonym, Jane Roe, no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947-2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life. Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with Norma, discovered her personal papers-a previously unseen trove-and witnessed her final moments. The Family Roe presents her life in full. Propelled by the crosscurrents of sex and religion, gender and class, it is a life that tells the story of abortion in America. Prager begins that story on the banks of Louisiana's Atchafalaya River where Norma was born, and where unplanned pregnancies upended generations of her forebears. A pregnancy then upended Norma's life too, and the Dallas waitress became Jane Roe. Drawing on a decade of research, Prager reveals the woman behind the pseudonym, writing in novelistic detail of her unknown life from her time as a sex worker in Dallas, to her private thoughts on family and abortion, to her dealings with feminist and Christian leaders, to the three daughters she placed for adoption. Prager found those women, including the youngest-Baby Roe-now fifty years old. She shares her story in The Family Roe for the first time, from her tortured interactions with her birth mother, to her emotional first meeting with her sisters, to the burden that was uniquely hers from conception. The Family Roe abounds in such revelations-not only about Norma and her children but about the broader family connected to the case. Prager tells the stories of activists and bystanders alike whose lives intertwined with Roe. In particular, he introduces three figures as important as they are unknown: feminist lawyer Linda Coffee, who filed the original Texas lawsuit yet now lives in obscurity; Curtis Boyd, a former fundamentalist Christian, today a leading provider of third-trimester abortions; and Mildred Jefferson, the first black female Harvard Medical School graduate, who became a pro-life leader with great secrets. An epic work spanning fifty years of American history, The Family Roe will change the way you think about our enduring American divide: the right to choose or the right to life. Editorial Reviews *10/04/2021 Journalist Prager (The Echoing Green) reveals in this trenchant account the identity of the child at the center of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. After giving two previous children up for adoption, Dallas waitress Norma McCorvey (1974-2014) became pregnant for a third time and, under the pseudonym Jane Roe, challenged Texas's ban on abortion in 1970. By the time the Supreme Court ruled on the case, however, McCorvey had already given birth to a daughter, who was adopted by a Texas couple. Prager profiles Shelley Lynn Thornton, as she's now known, as well as the two other daughters born to McCorvey; Curtis Boyd, an abortion provider in Texas; Mildred Fay Jefferson, the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and a prominent antiabortion activist; and Linda Coffee, one of the attorneys who represented Jane Roe. The book excels in portraying McCorvey, a complicated woman with an indifference to truth and a need for attention who falsely claimed that her own mother sought to abort her, and who, in 1995, became an antiabortion advocate, a stance she later said was an act. Prager also places her life in the context of her family tree, which included three generations redirected by unwanted pregnancy. Nuanced, fine-grained, and gripping, this is a masterful study of the human lives behind a landmark case. (Sept.) - Publishers Weekly In this stirring achievement of reportage, a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, Prager mines scores of interviews with McCorvey and other players in the legal case (including Baby Roe, now a middle-aged woman), his gorgeous prose illuminating the eye of a Category 5 cultural hurricane. - Oprah Daily Joshua Prager has humanized the story of how abortion came to be legalized in the United States- and how it came to shape the American culture wars.... The book reads like detective fiction. - Andrew Solomon The scope is sweeping, the writing is beautiful. It's an epic story worthy of the impact this one case has had on the American psyche. - NPR - Michel Martin A stunning read. - D Magazine Mr. Prager's book is stupendous, a masterwork of reporting.... If you want to understand Roe more deeply before the coming decision, read it. - Wall Street Journal - Peggy Noonan A prizeworthy masterpiece of poignant history, an emotionally compelling account of the profound issues that surround reproductive choice. - David J. Garrow Prager's book is not just a biography but also political history.... Prager excels in revealing the messy, complicated people at the heart of America's abortion fight; their motives, he seems to say, are much more tangled than any of them would likely admit.... The Family Roe is a fascinating portrait of a woman whose life was shaped by the abortion debate. - The New Republic Journalist Joshua Prager offers a masterclass in reporting in his book The Family Roe, which weaves concentric rings of activists and Christian fundamentalists, lawyers and Harvard Medical School graduates-groups called to action in the fiery debates over the case-to reveal a rich tapestry of American life and values in the 20th-century. - Time 2021-09-18 The real stories behind Roe v. Wade. At its heart, writes Prager, the case did not pit Roe against Wade; it pitted her against the fetus she was carrying. The fact is that Jane Roe, a pseudonym for a woman named Norma McCorvey, did not abort that fetus but instead gave birth to it. As Justice Harry Blackmun noted when Roe v. Wadecame before the bench, the normal 266-day human gestation period is so short that the pregnancy will come to term before the usual appellate process is complete. It did. McCorvey, born into a hardscrabble family in Louisiana that later moved to Texas, was a textbook case of someone not prepared for motherhood. When it developed that Norma was a lesbian, her mother said defiantly, I beat the fuck out of her. Sexually abused and psychologically troubled, Norma tried to piece together her life as the law mooted whether she had the right to terminate her pregnancies. It did not help the pro-abortion cause to which her name has been attached that she had given birth more than once and that her most publicly available daughter was pro-life--even as Norma, having been shunned by feminists such as Gloria Steinem, who, Norma said, became complacent and took me for granted, also wavered between pro-choice and pro-life stances. She finally declared, I'm not pro-choice, I'm not pro-life...I'm pro-Norma. In a narrative that often falls down rabbit holes, Prager depicts a fractured family that, even when its fostered offspring had been identified, could never quite cohere. If it answers any questions, his narrative gives cause to support choice--choice that, as the lives of the Roe family demonstrate, is seldom without great pain. Hopefully some of Prager's detective work can fruitfully inform the always-hot issue of abortion. A solid and timely yet overlong work of journalism that chases down leads, twists, and turns, legal and otherwise. - Kirkus Reviews Prodigiously researched, richly detailed, sensitively told....like a fairy tale set in working-class America. - The New Yorker - Margaret Talbot Extraordinary reporting.... Prager's narrative contains multitudes. - The Christian Century - Chris Hammer The Family Roe is an eminently valuable read. - Human Life Review - Maria Mcfadden Maffucci Through rigorous reporting and sensitive portrayals, Prager animates Roe's leading and supporting figures and remakes our understanding of them....interweaving in-depth biographical sketches to transform Roe from an abstract legal doctrine into an epic family saga. - Mindy Jane Roseman The Family Roe is a work of deep empathy without sentimentality, a recovery of fact over myth, a quintessentially American story. - Linda Greenhouse [A]n honest glimpse into the American soul...a sweeping, granular, century-deep case for women's sovereignty over themselves. - Anand Giridharadas Deeply reported and beautifully written.... Prager powerfully refutes the idea that women should have to win a morality contest in order to deserve access to abortion. - Slate - Lauren Gutterman The Family Roe is the definitive historical account of Roe v Wade and the human stories behind the headlines. Joshua Prager tells these stories with respect and backs his writing with stunning research. I write this as one who seeks to defend the unborn and end the abortion industry in America. But everyone who cares about abortion in America-on both sides-must read this book and then get back to the argument. The Family Roe is a remarkable achievement. - Journalist Joshua Prager offers a masterclass in reporting in his book The Family Roe, which weaves concentric rings of activists and Christian fundamentalists, lawyers and Harvard Medical School graduates-groups called to action in the fiery debates over the case-to reveal a rich tapestry of American life and values in the 20th-century. - Time With a novelist's grace, Prager shows how the narratives we use to justify our personal decisions and our politics too often fail to make room for our own and others' unresolved ambivalence, messy realities, and human frailty. - Nursing Clio - Lara Freidenfelds The Family Roe: An American Story is a masterpiece of journalistic research.... Prager challenges readers' presuppositions and refuses to fit the book's messy stories into clear moral categories. Things (and people) are not always what they seem. Nearly all the people profiled in this book carry deep secrets that they refuse to reveal to others-but that Prager, as a master journalist, repeatedly succeeds in uncovering. - Christianity Today - Daniel K. Williams Prager's book does more than educate the reader on legal history; it shows how one changes over a lifetime. It is a study of the human experience.... Prager reminds the reader that stances on abortion can be as fluid and complex as the generations-long battle over it. He offers no hint of his own political standing and ultimately leaves his complete history of Roe open to every reader. - Los Angeles Review of Books