The NPR Politics Podcast - The Secret History Of Jane Roe

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

The Family Roe is journalist Joshua Prager's sweeping look at the life of Norma McCorvey — better known as Jane Roe — and America's long fight over abortion access. NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben interviews the author for the latest installment of the NPR Politics Podcast book club.Learn more about upcoming live shows of The NPR Politics Podcast at nprpresents.org.Support the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's Susan Davis from the NPR Politics Podcast and Atlanta. Come see us live. Join me, Mara Liason, Asma Khalid, Tamara Keith, Miles Parks, Georgia Public Broadcasting's Stephen Fowler, and WABE's Raul Bali as we do our show live at the Buckhead Theater Thursday, October 20th at 8 p.m. You can find more information about tickets, including student ones, at nprpresents.org. Thanks to our partners at Georgia Public Broadcasting, WABE, and WCLK Jazz. We hope to see you there. Hey there, it is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political correspondent, and today, once again, we are getting away from the breaking news of the day to talk about books. This month's book is not itself breaking news, but it is incredibly timely. It is about Norma McCorvey, the real name of the woman who would become Jane Roe, as in Roe v. Wade. In other words, it's also a book about the recent history of the fight over abortion rights in America. And that's a fight that has reached monumental proportions with this summer's Supreme Court decision that overturned the rights that Roe v. Wade granted Americans. And so for our latest episode of the Politics Podcast Book Club,

we are talking to Joshua Prager. He is the author of that book. The book is called The Family Row. Prager is a journalist and author who has written for many outlets, and he has many accolades to his name, and we are super excited and honored to have him on today. Welcome, Joshua. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. While a lot of people listening have heard the Jane Roe, I would imagine far fewer know the name Norma McCorvey or know anything about her. So how would you describe her to someone who is not well acquainted? So Norma was sort of the perfect person for me to tell the larger story of abortion in America through because her life really was defined by a lot of the very same things that I think make

abortion particularly fraught in America, particularly sort of sex and religion and what she saw as the kind of incompatibility or irreconcilability of those two things. And particularly her sexuality when she comes out to her to her parents. And that that is driven home in sort of very dramatic fashion. The fact that one cannot be gay when she, first of all, her mother beats her, but also Norma goes across state lines with a friend of hers from school, a young girl. They're about 12 years old. They check into a motel. The police are called. The girl alleges, as Norma said to me, that she, Norma, tried inappropriate things with her. And Norma is then sent away to a school for quote-unquote delinquent children.

You know, she bounces through these schools and she decides she's going to have a regular life with a white picket fence and all that. She gets married at 16, but then, and gets pregnant right away. She later alleges that her husband beat her. That's maybe the first of many, many lies. She often re-imagined herself as not sort of a sinner, but a victim. And she often was telling

about these sort of horrible things she suffered, which she didn't suffer. She doesn't want this child to get divorced. She begs her mother to take the child off her hands. She later says her mother kidnapped the child. So it's, again lie, places that child for adoption. Then even though she's gay and is having sort of hundreds of affairs with women, she's also a prostitute at this time, is occasionally sleeping with men, she's selling drugs, she gets pregnant again, places that child for adoption. And then as you say, she gets pregnant a third time. And that is the child that becomes the Roe baby. There's so much that we could say about Norma McCorvey here. And one thing in particular, I mean, you've gotten at that she was a complicated person, personally,

morally, in all sorts of ways. I want to talk especially about her activism as well. Let's start by just sort of outlining her history. She both was a supporter of abortion rights, but then later in her life, an opponent of abortion rights. How did all of that happen? Yeah, so that's a very sad story. Basically, Norma did not want to become a plaintiff. She actually didn't even know what the word plaintiff meant. She wanted an abortion. And the problem right from the start was that the lawyers who needed her to represent their case cared more for her as a plaintiff than as a client, they could have helped her to try to have an abortion. The lawyers were Linda Coffey and Sarah Weddington. Sarah Weddington herself had had an abortion and worked for an abortion referral network. And when Norma steps sort of into the spotlight in the late 1980s, she wanted a seat at the table. She wanted at that point to become an advocate, but they marginalized her. She didn't speak about abortion the way that they did. And they really alienated her. They didn't invite her to their book parties or their protests or their marches. And every now and then when she was there, they would sort of say to her the few words that it was okay for her to speak. She got very angry about this, understandably, I think. And when then in 1995, she's working at an abortion clinic in Texas,

and as is sort of the way often of people who oppose abortion, they set up shop right next to an abortion clinic, setting up what they call a crisis pregnancy center. The man there was named Flip Benham. He was an evangelical minister who was actually the head then of Operation Rescue. He ingratiates himself to Norma. He befriends her. As much as the pro choice is sort of pushing her away, he wants to only sort of hug her and hold her close. And she then decides to flip. She switches sides. As one of the heads of the pro-life community put it in Texas, the poster child jumped off the poster.

But just as Norman didn't feel at home on the pro-choice side, she doesn't feel at home on the pro-life side because they're exploiting her too. And one big, big, big problem is that they basically tell her that she can't be gay. She has to renounce her homosexuality

and this causes her untold grief and suffering. But she also, you make it clear, and she made it clear at times that she was often driven by money, that she just needed money, especially towards the end of her life. What was your sense of how much she was an opportunist versus a believer at any given point? It's a great question. So the name of the subtitle of my book is An American Story. And there are so many things about this that are uniquely American. It's not only the fact that we had this sort of puritanical roots that made, as I mentioned earlier, the sort of incompatibility of sex and religion sort of, you know, grow here and lead to a lot of the problems

we have. And it's not just the sort of politicization of abortion, but it's also like, you know, again, she's sort of being whisked off literally to Hollywood by Gloria Allred, and she's learning to monetize her plaintiffship in a way that it's hard to imagine would take place just about anywhere else. This evangelical minister is baptizing her in a pool while the cameras roll. He dyes his hair, he blow dries his hair, he dyes his teeth white, and then she's on ABC News and all that. It's very American. By the same token, she did actually have conviction when it came to abortion. She would do what she was paid to do. Absolutely. She was able to sort of get by, wring a living out of this plaintiff ship. And she pledged allegiance to extremes on

both sides. But I know that she had something she believed in because she said the same thing at three very different points in her life. In the first ever interview she gave, it was days after Roe, and her lawyers had sort of forgotten about her and moved along. The case was decided in 1973, and she'd already given birth in June of 1970. Well, a Baptist newsletter approaches her through her lawyer, Linda Coffey, and asks her her thoughts on abortion. And she says, you know what? I now feel very strongly that abortion ought to be legal, but only through the first trimester of pregnancy. Because after that, she says, you might be killing a baby. Now, what's amazing is then fast forward to 1995,

when she publicly renounces Roe and switches over to the other side. Well, as I say, she's interviewed by Ted Koppel on Nightline. And she says that same thing again, even though she's infuriating her new friends in Operation Rescue. She says the exact same thing. And then at the very end of her life, she says it to me. I was with her actually when she passed away. And she said it to me a few days before that from her hospital bed. She really did believe that abortion ought to be legal, but only to that point.

And in that way, it was another way that she really represented the majoritarian middle ground in America. That's what our polls show us, that most Americans, 60-something percent, believe. All right, we're going to take a quick break. More on The Family Row in a moment. And we're back with Joshua Prager, author of The Family Row. One notable thing about this book is so much of it takes place in Texas. And Texas, of course, remains important in conversations about abortion because of its six-week ban that went into effect last year. I'm wondering if you have thoughts on why. Why is Texas so central to the story of abortion in America? The best answer I can give is that, you know, you have a large group of girls and women in Texas who invariably want to be able to have abortions. That has to do with various things, including sort of class, as I mentioned earlier, and poverty, and access to health care. And then

you also have, at the same time, a very sort of robust, you know, pro-life community. And so these two things are really in conflict. One other interesting thing that I had not known about until I sort of dove into this book was the incredible overlap between the fights for gay rights and women's rights. And it's not a coincidence in my opinion. Right. Well, and it's also notable because racism, homophobia, misogyny did so much to shape the lives of the people you write about. And then those civil rights are tied to this fight going forward. When you saw the Supreme Court opinions come out that referenced those other cases having to do with gay marriage and contraception and interracial marriage, that must not have surprised you then, right? Did that

just sort of advance things? It didn't surprise me actually at all. It is no, it's impossible, no matter how much Alito wants to say that this won't have now legal ramifications on other, the other kinds of, you know, cases you mentioned, of course they will. I found it interesting too that, you know, Thomas came out and said that, but did not mention sort of interracial marriage. He, of course, is married to a white woman. And one of the things that I turn to over and over and over again in my book is something that by their exposure to the raw edges of human existence. Basically, that if you are exposed to a person who has an abortion or who feels or who knew someone who had an abortion, then you will be moved by that exposure. He doesn't mention that his own daughter, Sally, had an unwanted pregnancy in college, which really sort of redirected her life. And in fact, one of his fellow justices on the bench, Justice Powell, later confides to his

clerks an amazing story that he was a pro-life lawyer at a law firm in Virginia. When one of the messengers at his firm comes to him and says, you know what, I brought, this is pre-Roe, I brought my girlfriend to an illegal abortion provider here in Virginia. She died and now I'm wanted for manslaughter. And that double tragedy shaped Powell's thinking. So, you know, I often look at where, you know, where human beings stand. So again, who is an adult now? I'm wondering, what does that story illuminate about the fight over abortion today? Why is this relevant beyond the obvious historical connections? Two things. The first is very sort of pointedly, dramatically in black and white terms, it's often, it's a story about class. And, you know, right now we are such a divided country. I mean, we already were, but now literally I step on this side of this, of this

state line, I'm allowed to have an abortion. I step on that side of the state line, I'm not to have an abortion. And often it is class that is determining who can and who cannot have an abortion, who has access. And Norma's life and the lives of her children far better illuminate that issue than any glorious sign of pain. And that is one very important thing that I think Norma's story and the stories of her daughters bring to light. The other is that, you know, man, abortion is complicated. All four of these women in their own ways had very nuanced and sort of ambiguous feelings about abortion. All four of them, by the way, were pro-choice and are pro-choice, the daughters. You mean Norma McCorvey and her three daughters? That's right. That's right. Even the Roe baby, whose very existence owed to the unavailability of abortion at that time, feels that abortion ought to be legal. And so I do think our country would be better served if people recognize that and did not sort of just take the approach that if you disagree with me, you are a horrible human being.

This has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Joshua, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much. I was really happy that you reached us. Thank you so much. I was really happy that you reached out. Thank you. Yeah. We will be announcing our next book soon. Please stay tuned to us on Twitter at at NPR Politics, as well as on Facebook at n.pr slash politics group for what the book will be so you can read it along with us. Until then, I am Danielle Kurtzleben, and thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.