Roe Summer
a review of Joshua Praeger's The Family Roe
Eventually, when writing a book about history that’s happening under your feet, and some point, I suppose, you just have to abandon hope of staying current. When I read Joshua Prager’s The Family Roe, published in September 2021, I wondered what he would have written or how the tone of the book may have shifted if he had included the Supreme Court adding Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health to its docket in May 2021, and Senate Bill 8 in Texas — the Texas Heartbeat Bill—stoking headline furor from its passing in May to its enactment that fall. I wondered what the book would have made of the amicus briefs submitted for Dobbs and the oral arguments that fall.
I wondered what the book would have been if it had been published in September 2022 instead.
But I include all that speculation not to point to a lack in the book, but rather the challenge of writing history as it’s being written. The story of Norma McCorvey, aka Jane Roe, is over, but the story of her daughters—the underlying investigation that drives the narrative of this book—continues.
Prager’s history was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for 2021 and has had wide acclaim (wide meaning from all sides of the abortion debate):
"The Family Roe is the definitive historical account of Roe v Wade and the human stories behind the headlines. Joshua Prager tells these stories with respect and backs his writing with stunning research. I write this as one who seeks to defend the unborn and end the abortion industry in America. But everyone who cares about abortion in America―on both sides―must read this book and then get back to the argument. The Family Roe is a remarkable achievement."
― R. Albert Mohler, Jr. President, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
"The Family Roe is an eminently valuable read."
― Maria Mcfadden Maffucci, Human Life Review (she does have some substantive critiques of his arguments about Catholic positions on abortion. In my opinion, her objection stands.)
"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
"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 reveal a rich tapestry of American life and values in the 20th-century."
― Time
Personally, this strikes me as a solid lineup of reviews. If I wrote something on abortion that had this many compliments given by this broad coalition of folks, I would consider it a job well done.
Prager’s book is a biography as much as it is a political history of abortion in the United States. Norma McCorvey’s life is tumultuous—and the cards were stacked against her from the beginning. Unknown to most Americans is that McCorvey was a mother of three girls. She only had a relationship with her eldest, who was in the custody of Norma’s mother, and that was not excellent. Her youngest, Shelly, was “Baby Roe” the child Norma was pregnant with when she, by sheer happenstance, became the plaintiff in one of the most famous court cases in U.S. history. Norma didn’t want to be the plaintiff, she just didn’t want to be pregnant. She already had one daughter she wasn’t caring for and another daughter who had been whisked away from her in the hospital and given up for adoption.
(Incidentally, Henry Wade, the Dallas District Attorney, should not have been the defendant listed in that case. Rather, the defendant—since abortion was outlawed by state law—should have been Crawford Martin, the Texas Attorney general. Both names cemented in the national consciousness were entirely contingent and arbitrary.)
Prager details Norma’s difficult family history, her attempts to build a life for herself, and her long career of being Jane Roe—out of financial necessity more than anything else. Despite a much-publicized conversion, Norma’s views on abortions were consistent throughout her life: it should be legal for the first three months of pregnancy and not after that. Close to 70% of the American public agrees with her. But you wouldn’t know it from the political tsunami her case set off.
I appreciated Prager’s history of Roe v. Wade’s role in drawing new political alliances and hardening political divisions. Roe v. Wade strikes me as something like the New Deal or Reconstruction—one of these watersheds in American history where things might have gone so differently, but a sort of racial greed and patriarchal opportunism took things in a downhill direction that stoked division rather than promoted unity. The story of any community is difficult choices and compromises found. It seems to me so much of American history is a story of choices that were made poorly. And, as so many of the wise will tell you, the outcome of a decision is nearly (not quite, but nearly) as important as the manner in which the decision is made. We live in the aftermath of decisions, sure, but it is the decision’s process of coming into being that reverberates the longest in our lives.
But more than his reporting on the larger picture, I appreciated his personalist approach to the woman at the heart of the story—and the family that is her context: both past and future. It’s a colorful story full of big Texas scenery: there’s lots of beer, sex, gay bars, and marijuana. It’s not the America celebrated on Ivy League campuses (or the University of Notre Dame) or on the Supreme Court bench where their graduates end up, but that’s American culture for you, folks. In the midst of ideological disagreements, we so often forget who our neighbor is—to be curious about them, to seek to understand them as they are, to learn where they come from and how. Ultimately, I’m grateful for Prager’s curiosity that brings out Norma’s very American, very depressing, very fragile, resilient, and powerful story to light.