The family Roe An American story

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.)

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. Wade came 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.