The Family Roe: An American Story
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4.8 • 15 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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
"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." —Michel Martin, NPR
"Stupendous…. If you want to understand Roe more deeply before the coming decision, read it." —Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
