Home › Books › The Family Roe: An American Story
The Family Roe: An American Story
by
57/99
Critics
66/99
Readers
n/a
Scholars
37/99
Rating
77/99
Volume
65/99
Rating
68/99
Volume
—
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
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.
Preview
Reviews
"The book excels in portraying McCorvey ..."
"Wade may be taking its last breaths."
"For it is in the sheer volume of disparate stories that you appreciate the colossal cost of tying women for decades to the consequences of encounters that might have lasted a half-hour (at best) and may or may not have been meaningfully chosen ..."
"He paints a believable portrait of a woman who cared about flirting and fun, seduction and sex, attention and affirmation...but not about ideology, or politics, or anybody else's rights, really, let alone their souls ..."
"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 ..."
"But Prager's book isn't simply about family lies, twists, and spectacles — these are just the spice in the first complete biography of the family who accidentally made history, the individuals who have shaped the debate surrounding abortion in the United States today."
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!