The Family Roe: An American Story

An American Story

Cover Art for 9781324036074, The Family Roe: An American Story by Joshua Prager
ISBN: 9781324036074
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 13 September, 2022
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Editions:
2 other editions of this product

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.

Booko is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more

Shop Preferences

Customize which shops to display. You can include the following shops by logging in to change your settings.

Booko is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more

Historical Prices

Loading...
This graph is for informational purposes only. Occasionally pricing data is captured incorrectly, through bugs in Booko or the stores supplying data, which may distort the graph, providing undue hope that even lower prices sometimes appear.

Recently Updated