I'm Anne Bocock and welcome to "Between the Covers".

Roe V. Wade may be the most well-known, most debated Supreme Court decision ever.

The plaintiff Jane Roe is why Americans gained a right to abortion nearly 50 years ago.

What you may not know is that Jane Roe herself never had that abortion.

She gave up her baby girl for adoption, as she did with her two previous pregnancies, and hold onto your hat because that's just a tiny bit of this story.

After a decade of research into generations of family secrets, the whole story is told in an extraordinary book, "The Family Roe: An American Story" by Joshua Prager.

Joshua Prager, welcome to "Between the Covers" and congratulations on an incredible book.

Thank you so much for having me.

I appreciate it.

We have a lot to get into as there is a ton of information in this book, but I'd really like to set up what we're going to do here with a part of what you wrote in the prologue.

If you could indulge me and read from that, I would love that.

Sure.

When I started this book, I did not wear reading glasses, but a decade later I do.

So there you go.

Roe V. Wade was so named for its pseudonymous plaintiff, Jane Roe and its defendant, Dallas district attorney Henry Wade.

But at its heart, the case did not pit Roe against Wade.

It pitted her against the fetus she was carrying and the court's ruling alluded if only obliquely to the existence of the child that fetus became.

Wrote Blackmun, "the normal 266 day human gestation period is so short that the pregnancy will come to term before the usual appellate process is complete".

Blackmun was making a simple, legal point.

It did not matter that the gestation of a lawsuit is longer than the gestation of a baby.

The case had not been rendered moot because its plaintiff was no longer pregnant, but Blackmun, justice Blackmun who wrote the majority opinion in Roe did not write that Jane Roe had given birth and the public was left to assume that Jane Roe, whoever she was, had gotten the abortion made legally available to her.

Normally a plaintiff is required to use her real name.

The federal rules of civil procedure demand it, but owing to the stigma of abortion, an exception was made in Roe and Blackmun addressed it.

Despite the use of the pseudonym he wrote, no suggestion is made that Roe is a fictitious person.

Jane Roe was real.

Her name was Norma McCorvey.

And when in 2010, I read an article that mentioned that Roe had been decided too late for Norma to have an abortion, I wondered about the baby she'd placed for adoption 40 years before.

I decided to look for her.

Months after Roe gave birth to that child in 1970, she met her lifelong partner, Connie Gonzalez.

Norma had just left Gonzalez when in June 2010, I visited Gonzalez at her Dallas home.

She told me that the stories Norma had told about herself were not true.

Gonzales's home was due to be foreclosed on when I returned to see her the next year, she pointed me to a cache of papers that Norma had left behind in the garage and did not want.

Looking through her speeches and letters were holy cards and sheet music.

I wondered not only about the Roe baby, but about the other two daughters Norma had let go.

I wondered also about Norma.

Lifting a picture of Norma as a toddler atop a pony, I looked at the little house behind her up on piers and wondered too about her family rooted there on the banks of a Louisiana river.

I think that is the perfect way to set this up.

Here we are close to 50 year anniversary of this landmark decision, and we know so little of the players, including the family surrounding the case.

So if we could start with Jane Roe, Norma McCorvey, who was she?

So she was born, as we mentioned there, in a tiny river town in Louisiana and moved to Texas when she was a toddler.

Her family was very religious.

They became Jehovah's Witnesses in part because Norma's father hoped that becoming a Jehovah's Witness would reign in his wife who had developed a big drinking problem and slept with a lot of the men she served drinks to in the bars where she worked in Texas, but that did not happen.

The marriage was a broken one.

They soon divorced.

And Norma became a really wild child right around the time of adolescence.

She ended up going to various state schools for quote unquote delinquent children.

When she came out to her mother as a lesbian, her mother beat her, Norma's mother Mary spoke to me openly about that fact and Norma soon got married.

She got married at 16 years old to a man, had a child, divorced quickly.

And she then worked in lesbian bars and had hundreds of female partners, but occasionally also was with men and she was pregnant for the third time in 1970, when she became Jane Roe.

And that sort of gets us to where the Roe V. Wade story begins.

There is so much more about her, but I want to mention some of the other really important people to round this story out.

And one is Mildred Jefferson.

Now, honestly, I could have read an entire book about this woman.

She was the first black woman admitted to Harvard Medical School.

She had an incredible career and then this downward spiral, please tell us about her.

She was a very brilliant woman from a small town in Texas.

All of the characters in my book are based in Texas and she becomes really the architect of the pro-life movement.

Just to mention a few of the things she did.

She is the one who brings Ronald Reagan into the pro-life fold.

He sees her on a television show just before Roe called "The Advocates".

And he is convinced.

He had sort of signed into law something called the therapeutic abortion act, which made abortion legal in California up to the 20th week, that was in 1967.

And he becomes pro-life and she, Mildred, becomes the head of the largest pro-life organization in America, the national right to life committee.

And more than anyone she politicizes Roe, she realizes that there are great political gains to doing so for the Republican party, what is not known among many other things is how this woman, this Harvard trained surgeon, why she made this switch of careers.

And all these years, the pro-life have looked at her as this sort of saint who left sort of the highest medical career to devote herself to the unborn.

But it's a lot more complicated than that.

What happened was, and I was able to sort of piece her life together by finding her ex-husband and her divorce record and most importantly an FBI file because president Nixon wanted to appoint her to a medical board in 1973.

And the file showed me the following, that the reason her career did not satisfy her was because it was railroaded.

It was sabotaged by misogyny and racism that was so intense that the people who were interviewed by the FBI spoke of it openly.

And to that point, Mildred had been this incredibly sort of confident and self determined person.

She believed that if you will something to be, it will be, but she comes to be very cynical and depressed.

And not only does she experience great difficulties in her medical career, but also in her private life, because the man she marries is white and interracial marriage is illegal in half of the country at that time.

And what was so sad is she says to her husband that this world is so unjust that we can't bring a child into it.

And so she refused to have any children.

And what's so fascinating is that that same woman who made that choice comes to believe that every single conception must result in the birth of a child, there ought to be absolutely no exceptions ever made for abortion.

Abortion is murder from the moment of conception.

She also becomes a great hoarder, which is a very difficult thing.

And she dies alone in sort of a mound of her papers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's a difficult story.

It's difficult, it's a tragic story, as far as she is.

There's someone else who stood out to me and this is a doctor.

His name is Curtis Boyd.

And I don't think I am overstating this to say that his entire life trajectory changed because of a pregnancy of one of his classmates in high school.

That's exactly right.

He was a kid and his crush was a girl named Virginia.

He was also a religious man.

All of these folks were religious.

Mildred was the son of a preacher.

I'll just mention one more thing about Mildred if it's okay that I didn't think of at that time, what was so fascinating about her to me was that the very same things that were such hindrances in her medical career, the parts of who she was, the fact that she was black and a woman were enormous assets in the pro-life world, because here was a group of people desperate to be seen as more than white Catholic men.

And here was a black Methodist woman.

And so that just made me think about when you mentioned Dr. Boyd, anyway, his high school crush gets pregnant.

And Curtis is struck by the fact that her life is never the same.

She's made to leave school.

She's a pariah.

She is kicked out of her church, et cetera.

And yet the young man who got her pregnant is fine.

He's seen as a stud.

He's literally the captain of the football team.

And Curtis says that he needs to devote himself towards making that change.

And he becomes a doctor and then he becomes a feminist and he begins providing abortions in Texas pre-Roe.

What's so fascinating about him though.

And what really is the reason I chose him sort of to tell through whom, you know, he was my character through whom to tell the larger pro-choice story is because setting aside even his enormous contributions to that movement, for example, the fact that he is the one who pioneers the standard method of second trimester abortion now, dilation and evacuation.

And after his friend, George Tiller was murdered, he actually becomes the largest provider of third trimester abortions in this country.

But the reason I chose him was because of his complete impenitence about his work.

At the time president Clinton said that abortion ought to be safe, legal, and rare, but Curtis says, well, why should it be rare?

It's a social and moral good.

It empowers women.

And that really is where the movement is today.

And Curtis was the one who sort of said that first.

He was an incredibly brave, determined man.

There was one more person that I would like to get to.

And that's Linda Coffee.

And I found this fascinating.

She is the feminist attorney who filed the original lawsuit.

And at the very beginning of this story, she's absolutely crucial.

At the end of the story, she's pretty much an unknown figure who's I think living on food stamps at that point.

Why don't we know much about her?

Well, you've asked a good question.

Linda Coffee was the woman who filed Roe V. Wade.

When Norma McCorvey became pregnant with her third child, she went to the adoption attorney who had brokered her previous two adoptions, a man named Henry McCluskey who had gone to law school with Linda.

He knows that Linda is hoping to find a plaintiff to challenge the abortion statutes in Texas.

And he introduces Norma to Linda.

And before I sort of tell you why she's unknown, what was so fascinating to me again, she was a religious Baptist.

And back then you could be both a feminist and an evangelical Christian.

The Southern Baptist Convention was actually pro-choice.

She was also gay and there was no language in any of their charters that repudiated homosexuality, that changes of course over time.

And that becomes very difficult for her.

After she sort of conceives of Roe and files Roe and helps to argue it in the lower courts, her co-counsel, Sarah Weddington, becomes the one everybody knows because she is just 26 years old when she argues the case in front of the Supreme Court.

And as much as Sarah enjoyed being in the spotlight, that is how much Linda did not enjoy being in it.

She was a recluse and became more and more so.

And what was so sad was Sarah knew that Linda would never step forward and sort of correct the record.

And so she basically cut Linda out of the story.

She just spoke of Roe as her own legal accomplishment, never mentioning Linda and Linda became, in the words of her own hometown paper, a historical footnote.

And you're right, when I found her, it was very sad.

She was living on food stamps, living in a house without heat in Texas with her partner, completely forgotten.

You started this research 11 years ago, and you discover that Norma never had the abortion, that there is a baby Roe.

This baby Roe is 50 years old right now.

I'm curious about, the scope of the research to me is absolutely enormous.

Shelly, who is the woman, at 19 years old, you find out that she was confronted by, I think the National Enquirer who wants, they also have found baby Roe.

They want to write this story.

If you would pick it up from there and then tell me what kind of a burden this has been for Shelly.

Yeah, a burden indeed.

So yes, she was 10 days shy of her 19th birthday.

She's walking through a parking lot, sort of footloose and fancy free on her way to get a tan in Washington state where she lived, when someone steps out of a van and says that they've been sent by her biological mother to find her.

And initially in that sort of moment, she's thrilled.

But then they tell her that her mother is Jane Roe, and that they are going to write about her whether she wants them to or not.

She is very overwhelmed by this.

She gets a lawyer to sort of pressure them to at least withhold her name, but evermore she's carrying two great burdens.

The first is that she has a secret.

She feels that if anyone knows who she had been born to, she will be outed and she doesn't know if a person wants to know her or doesn't want to know her because she is, as she comes to see the pro-life movement looks at her, the Roe baby.

The other thing is the fact that as I say, she's now seen as the Roe baby, the anonymous person whose conception occasioned the Roe V. Wade lawsuit.

Millions of people looked at her as the sort of living incarnation of their argument against abortion.

That was a very difficult thing for her to carry and she wanted to be rid of it.

And when I finally reached out to her all those years later, I said, look, first of all, I will never write about you against your wishes.

But second of all, I want to hear from you, what is that like?

I want to hear your story.

And she eventually decided that she wished to participate after I found the other two daughters Norma had given birth to, she wanted to know her sisters.

And so I brought them together and told their story in the pages of the book.

You were the first person to bring all three sisters together.

Am I correct?

And is there any relationship today?

So two of the three, the younger two are now close.

It is a complicated thing.

And of course, just because you share a biological parent doesn't mean you're going to be a close family, but all three were incredibly relieved to have found one another.

They had looked for each other in vain for decades and bringing them together way back when 2013 was a very sort of moving thing for me, obviously I had to sort of maintain my journalistic distance, but it was a very special moment.

And I wrote about it.

I also, unlike a lot of journalists today, do not really sort of involve myself in the writing, but at that point it would have been sort of disingenuous for me not to mention that I brought them together of course.

So I'm there at that point in the book, but most of the time I'm not there and I kept my feelings about abortion out of it.

I do mention in the author's note that I'm pro-choice, but what really I try desperately to do, and if I may say, I think I succeeded just based on the reaction of readers, I tried to write about both sides of this American war, really is what it is with empathy and understanding and allow them to sort of tell their stories and in so doing to kind of humanize abortion and let my reader come to experience Roe not through politics but through people.

As the title says, it's "The Family Roe: An American Story" Joshua, was there ever any more unlikely poster child for a movement than Norma?

I mean, she's contradictory, she's complicated.

I don't even know how your meetings would have been with this woman.

They were very complicated.

She was very erratic, but you're a hundred percent right, that looking back on it, she's not the plaintiff that the pro-choice movement would have selected for itself.

Obviously she famously switched to the other side and I write a lot about what was really behind that.

But if you think about it another way, she was in a sense the perfect poster child because studies show, this sort of big poll, show that Americans are ambivalent about abortion.

If their leaders on both sides are very sort of absolutist about it and ever moreso nowadays, Americans generally believe, and a large percentage of them do, that abortion ought to be legal, but only up to say roughly the first trimester of pregnancy.

And that was exactly what Norma believed.

She had come from a family where, as I mentioned, religion and sex were sort of seemingly incompatible.

And I think it is that irreconcilability that has made America particularly susceptible to having abortion sort of rip it apart.

She also wrote two autobiographies herself, and these were lies.

She told stories of rape and kidnapping and none of this was true.

None of it was true.

And just to give two examples that you just mentioned, she told people that, she alleged that she had been raped several times.

One of those times, she said she was in Catholic school and she turned a consensual night with a woman was about to become a rape by a nun.

In terms of a kidnapping, she said that her mother Mary had kidnapped her daughter, Melissa from her, her first born, when in fact Norma had begged her mother to take the child off of her hand.

She did not want to be a mother to her.

And when I came to understand these constant lies, basically what Norma was doing was sort of re-imagining herself as not a sinner, but as a victim.

And that made her life somehow more palatable in understanding the choices that she had made.

That said there was so much exploitation that you point out in this book on both sides of the issue.

And Norma herself, I believe was also pretty good at exploiting.

Do you want to talk about that?

Yeah, she did.

She gave as good as she got.

I mean, she was able to sort of ring a career out of her plaintiffship and make a living out of it, but you're right.

She was completely marginalized by the pro-choice movement.

She was desperate as the years went by, Roe V. Wade is decided in 1973, by the late 80s, she's desperate to sort of join this movement to sort of be on the front lines, but they marginalized her at protests and rallies.

They didn't invite her to their book parties.

She was really from the other side of the tracks and uneducated, and wouldn't speak about abortion and Roe in the way that they sort of thought it ought to be spoken about.

And that made her sort of low hanging fruit to the other side.

What was particularly upsetting about it to Norma, what made her most angry was that her lawyer, Sarah Weddington writes a book in 1992 in which she says that she had worked for an abortion referral network and had had an abortion herself.

And yet did not tell this to Norma and did not try in any way to help her to have an abortion herself when all those years before she was becoming the plaintiff Roe V. Wade.

So then Norma leaves the pro-choice movement behind, she is sort of brought into the pro-life hole by a man named flip Benham who's an evangelical minister.

He baptizes her, but just as you say, she was then exploited mercilessly.

First by the evangelical movement, then the Catholic movement.

And obviously if you could boast that Norma McCorvey, Jane Roe, was at your side, it would be good for fundraising.

It would be good for getting your name into the papers.

And that's unfortunately what happened.

And at the end of her life, Norma really was disillusioned and was alone.

She said that she was an orphan.

She didn't have a connection in a sense to either side.

What was so moving to me was that her eldest daughter, Melissa, really had not had any reason to call Norma a mother to her.

Nonetheless was there for Norma at the end of her life.

You know, this is a generational story, but it is about a landmark decision 50 years ago.

And I want to know, could there have ever been a more timely moment for this book?

You started it 11 years ago and look at us now.

It is bizarre to me the timing of the book.

And I think Roe V. Wade is not very long for this world.

I think Dobbs, the case out of Mississippi, I think the Supreme Court will either use it to overturn Roe outright or will use it to get rid of the viability threshold, the legal cutoff for abortion at roughly 24 weeks at the moment when the fetus can survive outside the womb.

Norma foresaw that day coming.

She said to me just before she died, which was right after Donald Trump's election, she said that Richie Rich is going to get his way, that he was going to appoint enough justices to the court that they would overturn Roe.

So though she wasn't educated, she sort of became a very keen observer of what she called her law.

I do hope that my book helps people to look at Roe in a way, as I mentioned, sort of through a human lens and understand in very real terms what's at stake.

The book is "The Family Roe: An American Story".

Joshua, this book is such an achievement.

I thank you for sharing your time with us.

I'm honored to have spoken about it with you.

Thank you.

I'm Ann Bocock.

Please connect with us.

You can also listen to our podcast, "GO Between the Covers", and I hope you join us again on the next "Between the Covers".