Politics & Government
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The Family Roe: An American Story
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.
16 pages of illustrations
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.
16 pages of illustrations
Editorial Reviews
"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
"Mr. Prager's book is stupendous, a masterwork of reporting…. If you want to understand Roe more deeply before the coming decision, read it."
― Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal
"Prodigiously researched, richly detailed, sensitively told.…like a fairy tale set in working-class America."
― Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker
"[A]n honest glimpse into the American soul...a sweeping, granular, century-deep case for women's sovereignty over themselves."
― Anand Giridharadas, New York Times Book Review
"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, Washington Post
"The Family Roe is a work of deep empathy without sentimentality, a recovery of fact over myth, a quintessentially American story."
― Linda Greenhouse, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Joseph M. Goldstein Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School
"A prizeworthy masterpiece of poignant history, an emotionally compelling account of the profound issues that surround reproductive choice."
― David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Liberty and Sexuality
"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, National Book Award–winning author of Far From the Tree
"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 ...
― Michel Martin, NPR
"Mr. Prager's book is stupendous, a masterwork of reporting…. If you want to understand Roe more deeply before the coming decision, read it."
― Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal
"Prodigiously researched, richly detailed, sensitively told.…like a fairy tale set in working-class America."
― Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker
"[A]n honest glimpse into the American soul...a sweeping, granular, century-deep case for women's sovereignty over themselves."
― Anand Giridharadas, New York Times Book Review
"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, Washington Post
"The Family Roe is a work of deep empathy without sentimentality, a recovery of fact over myth, a quintessentially American story."
― Linda Greenhouse, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Joseph M. Goldstein Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School
"A prizeworthy masterpiece of poignant history, an emotionally compelling account of the profound issues that surround reproductive choice."
― David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Liberty and Sexuality
"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, National Book Award–winning author of Far From the Tree
"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 ...
Readers Top Reviews
jockbrokerBenjamin S
I am clearly and forever someone who believes in Life. This book has helped me to understand women who choose to abort their babies. If there have been 80 million abortions performed, there are 80 million mothers who were so troubled and hopeless that were part of the equation. It will not make it right, but it will help advocates on both sides of this issue to understand we are all part of The Family Roe.
DisneyDenizen
An interesting tale about the woman and her life behind and beyond Roe v. Wade. Well written. Reads almost like a novel. But it will change no one's mind. It might interest you to learn that recent abortion debates are exactly that: recent. It used to be that no one (not church, not doctor, not politician, no one) considered the fetus to be part of the equation before the quickening, the time when a woman could feel movement. After Roe v. Wade, the matter was settled in this country. But if all voters voted for their self-interest, 99% of voters would vote Democrat, so Republican party players poked at the abortion issue until they gathered enough people to vote for that one issue to ensure they would have an actual political base. You are being played, people. Women who want to terminate pregnancies are going to continue to do so. The only real question is whether they will be able to do so safely.
Barry Newman
In this book of surpassingly intimate detail, Joshua Prager shows himself to be a reporter of rare tenacity and pure charm. For those, like me, who have tired of reading unending reports about the state of abortion politics, “The Family Roe” is a beautifully clear primer. But it is much more than that: an engrossingly microscopic history of a family that hardly knows it exists until Prager unites it around one accidental mother. The anonymous Jane Roe, by turns loved and reviled on either side of the abortion divide, is anything but anonymous now.
Barb E.
I actually stopped reading after the first 75 pages. My mind was so frustrated by the plight of these women having babies young and cycling downward in poverty. Then the child is raised in poverty and the cycle never was going to end. I'll go back to the book when I stop being angry about men making laws controlling women's bodies. ...so maybe never.
