(theme music playing) GRAHAM: Good evening everyone, and welcome to P&P Live.

I'm Brad Graham, the co-owner of Politics & Prose, along with my wife Lissa Muscatine.

And, uh, we're delighted to have with us this evening journalist and author Joshua Prager here to talk with a legal expert, Mary Ziegler.

Josh's new book, The Family Roe: An American Story.

The very beginning of his, um, important new book, Joshua makes very clear why the story of, uh, Norma McCorvey, the woman behind the pseudonym, Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade, uh, is worthy of such lengthy, detailed treatment.

After all, Josh notes Roe v. Wade is arguably the best known supreme court case.

It's, uh, certainly the most enduringly divisive having become a political Rorschach test and rallying cry.

And now, of course, nearly half a century since the case was decided, the precedent it set is up for reconsideration by the current supreme court.

Josh who used to be a senior writer for the Wall Street Journal and has written for several other publications spent, um, more than a decade on this book and says in, in the acknowledgements that it was difficult.

The result is a work that deeply explores not only the complicated contradictory life of McCorvey who died four years ago, but also her family's history, the lives of her three daughters, other protagonists in Roe v. Wade the court's decision, uh, and the social movements surrounding it.

In conversation with Josh this evening will be Mary Ziegler who's quoted three times in The Family Roe, and is a law professor whose written several books on the law of history and politics of the abortion debate in the United States.

So, uh, Josh and Mary, the screen is yours.

PRAGER: Thank you very, very much.

ZIEGLER: Thanks for having us.

So, Josh, I wanted to start by asking you how you got into writing about this, because as someone who writes about this, it can be, it is fraught, and it can be kind of thankless, too.

So I, if you could tell us the story of how this book got started 10 years ago, that would be a great starting point.

PRAGER: So it was 11 years ago, and I was in Provence, and I was reading an article in The New Yorker about gay marriage.

And the article mentioned in passing that sometimes a plaintiff is good for the cause she represents, and sometimes not so much.

And in the latter category, they sited Norma McCorvey, Jane Roe, because she famously switched from the pro-choice side to the pro-life side.

And then it noted something that I had not realized.

It said that she was not able to have the abortion, despite the fact that she had sought, despite the fact that Roe obviously legalized abortion, because it's now obvious to me a case, a law case takes longer than a pregnancy.

In fact, she was pregnant in 1969.

She filed Roe in 1970, but Roe was not decided until January of 1973.

And all of a sudden, my mind sort of lept to who that person was that, that child whose conception had occasioned a lawsuit.

And I said to myself he or she would be 40 years old at that time in 2010, and it seemed to me that they probably had learned who they'd been born to.

And not only that, had they learned, it would be a very difficult thing to carry.

Um, and those assumptions turned out to be correct.

So it was that strange sort of realization, that light bulb, uh, led me into this 10-year affair.

ZIEGLER: That's really interesting.

And I, can you tell me a little bit more about the Roe baby, because I know there was a lot of, the social movements I've studied always were, um, especially the anti-abortion or pro-life movement was sort of fixated on the idea that there was a, a Roe baby.

And so can you tell me about how it was to, well, to the story of finding that person and Norma McCorvey's other children, and then how to write about those people in ways that kind of broke through the pro-choice/pro-life binary that people often used to talk about these subjects.

PRAGER: So you're right, they, the pro-life movement had sort of looked upon this person, whoever she was, this unknown child of Jane Roe as this sort of living incarnation of their argument against abortion.

Um, and when I did find that person, and I'll tell you how I did in a moment, for very understandable reasons, she wanted no part of that.

Um, she had learned who she was, um, when she was nine, just shy of 19 years old.

Um, an investigator sent to find her by Norma and The National Inquirer sort of came upon her in a parking lot near where she lived.

She was off to get a, um, a tan, um, in a tanning salon, and they changed her life forever.

They told her that they would be writing this story whether they, whether she wanted them to or not.

Um, she prevailed upon them to at least withhold her name.

But henceforth, she then felt that she was burdened by two sort of enormous, um, weights.

The first was that she now carried a secret.

She now felt that if anyone sort of learned who she was, meaning who she'd been born to, that she was the Roe baby, that they would not be able to sort of appreciate her for who she had been prior and who she was, Shelley Lynn Thornton, um, someone who she said at that point just wanted to date cute boys and go shopping for shoes.

And the second thing was that symbolism.

She wanted no part of it.

Um, she hadn't, she, she hadn't really given abortion that much thought.

Her mother, um, her mother told me was pro-life, but, um, Shelley hadn't really examined the issue, and she didn't want to be sort of used as a prop, um, in, in the war over abortion.

Um, in terms of how I was able to sort of cut through those, you know, those binaries, the propaganda and the rhetoric.

What I really tried to do was to humanize this crazy story was to tell it, uh, the story of abortion in America, not through politics and movements, but really through people.

And in Norma, I had this sort of perfect protagonist, because her life wended, of course, through both sides of this incredible divide.

And she was actually really important, um, to both sides as, as we can discuss a little bit.

Um, and so also, Norma was very ambivalent about abortion despite the things that she was made to say when she represented both sides.

She actually had a real sort of clarity and vision of, of she knew what she believed in, and she was deeply ambivalent about abortion.

And so I was, I tried to simply be, I was very fair with both sides.

I allowed them to speak for themselves, and I hoped that their stories might sort of illustrate these, might, might be a window into this much larger, um, um, problem that, that America now finds itself in terms of in, in sort of as Lawrence Tribe put it, "a clash of absolutes," this unbridgeable war between the pro-life and the pro-choice.

ZIEGLER: That's great.

And can you tell me a little bit about how you found Shelley, because this is, this sort of the nerd in me that loves the spade work that it takes to uncover.

Um, just briefly, Josh and I met through this sort of thing.

So and, and one of the other characters, we'll talk about who's a fascinating person, Dr. Mildred Jefferson.

Josh was trying to uncover a kind of tiny detail about her biography that only someone as into this as me would know, which is how we met.

So would you mind telling us the story of how you found Shelley, because I think that's a pretty interesting one.

PRAGER: Yeah, so I first just reached out to Norma, and I said, you know, I identified myself and wondered if she would speak to me about this.

And she said I had to pay her.

And I explained that I couldn't do that.

And so she said no.

She did not help me.

And I started reading about her, and I learned that she had had a partner of many years.

She was gay.

She had to renounce her homosexuality when she went over to the pro-life side.

We can discuss that and the horrible toll it took on Norma, but, um, this woman named Connie Gonzales, stood by Norma through decades of sort of neglect and combustibility.

Norma was a very difficult person.

Also, incredible infidelity.

She had by her own account hundreds of partners.

She was in fact, um, a prostitute for a time.

Nobody, um, knew that until I sort of wrote about it in my book.

Um, but Connie told me when I reached out to Connie that Norma had actually just left her one year prior, a few years after Connie had had a stroke.

And I went to go visit Connie in Texas, um, and she was there.

And my whole book is based in Texas, all of the characters are in Texas.

And she was there, and she was with her niece who was her care taker.

And I went back to visit Connie a second time six months later, and I had failed a few times, um, in my attempts to learn who Norma's daughter was.

Um, for example, I reached out to the, um, sister of the adoption attorney who had brokered the adoptions of Norma's children.

That attorney, Henry McCluskey, was a very important man.

And he sadly was murdered just a few months after Roe having nothing to do with Roe.

Um, but I had struck out.

And when I went back to Connie the second time, she mentioned to me that sadly, her home was about to be foreclosed on.

And Norma's private papers were in the garage and were about to be thrown out.

And I said, "Please do not throw those papers out.

Those are important papers.

Can I have them?"

And she said, "Yes."

And she and her niece put them into garbage bags for me, and I put them into the trunk of my rental car.

And I later acquired those papers from Norma.

She did not want them and those papers are now actually at a research library at Harvard.

Um, but they were incredibly important.

And when I first just sort of looked through the papers, I was simply looking for a date of birth, uh, the date of birth of her youngest child, the "Roe baby".

And it was on one piece of paper, one out of thousands.

Norma had mentioned that that child had been born June, June 2nd, 1970.

She mentioned it in a conversation that she had with a Catholic newsletter.

And from there, I learned just going online that there had been 37 girls born in Dallas County, um, on that date.

And, um, from there, it was just sort of a, a, a, another month or so until I found her.

And I didn't know, I didn't know for sure that she knew, um, that she had been born to Norma, and so I didn't to disrupt her life and say, "By the way, you know, in case you didn't know."

And so I reached out to the, the woman who had raised her, to her mother.

And her mother, and I asked if she knew the name Henry McCluskey, the adoption attorney.

And she said right away, "Yes, and we know about Norma, too."

She then asked her daughter, Shelley, if Shelley wished to speak with me.

And Shelley said that she did not.

And so I promised her that I would never write her, write about her against her wishes.

And I think set off to look for Norma's other two daughters, and I found them.

And they had fascinating stories, too.

And I then, a year later, went back to Shelley's mother, and I said, "By the way, I have found Norma's other two daughters."

At that point, Shelley called me and said that she wished to participate in my book.

She was excited to meet those sisters.

Um, all three have looked in vain for one another, and so that was really the beginning of the book.

ZIEGLER: It's interesting.

And I know one of the things that's really striking about this book, too, is that if you write about Norma, you're not writing on a blank slate, because lots of people, as you mention in the pro-life movement, have written about Norma, and the pro-choice movement have written about Norma.

And probably most significantly, Norma wrote a lot about Norma, right?

She had two, I think, at least two books about her own life.

And so I as, first of all, how was it writing against that background, and how did you find that Norma had invented a version of herself very different from the one you were uncovering in her papers and otherwise?

PRAGER: So the papers sort of were totally disorganized, but little by little, they were sort of, um, a, a guide helping me navigate the crazy life that Norma had lived.

There would be the name of a human being, and I didn't know who that was.

And it would turn out to be an ex-girlfriend of hers, or there would be the name of a abortion clinic where it turned out that she had worked, and on, and on, and on.

There were taxes, there were letters that were written to her.

There was sort of everything.

And those papers plus a decade of research, so interviewing hundreds and hundreds of people and looking for those people enabled me to sort of strip away the real just fictions.

These two autobiographies that Norma wrote were complete fictions.

Um, it's sort of amazing what she did was, and it's, it's sad and telling.

She re-imagined herself as not a sinner, but as a victim.

This was very important to her.

So to give them a few examples.

When she had a consensual affair with a woman who was about to become a nun in Catholic school, Norma wrote that she had been raped by that woman.

When she begged her mother, her own mother to take her first child off her hands and raise that child, her daughter Melissa, rather than writing that her own mother had adopted her child, which was true, she wrote that her mother kidnapped her child.

Um, another example.

Norma was shot at.

Um, her home was shot at, um, in 1989, and she told everyone that this happened because she was Jane Roe, when in fact, she and Connie told me it had to do with a drug deal that went wrong.

Norma was dealing drugs at the time.

And so over and over and over again, I sort of found out what really happened.

And then what I did, sometimes Norma jokes, she said to me once, "I liked my version better."

But I said, you know, "Norma, we, help me here get, get the truth down," and she did help me.

She actually wanted to know exactly what had happened.

She lived a difficult and complicated life.

She didn't remember exactly what had happened.

The stories she had told had sort of supplanted the realities of her life.

And so she did help me.

She was thrilled, for example, when she remembered for me the name of the man who was the biological father of her youngest child.

And so on and on and on over the course of hundreds of hours with Norma over the last four years of her life, I was able to sort of put that life together.

ZIEGLER: I'm fascinated by, by Norma's desire to, to frame herself as a victim.

I imagine some of that was, I, I'm curious about why she did that, and I'm also curious about how that narrative suited really both social movements, because the idea of Norma's victimhood resonates so strongly in abortion politics, and it has for decades.

So I don't know if, I imagine her reasons went beyond that, but I'm curious both why, why you think she felt the need to invent this story and then how it, it fit so perfectly what social movements were trying to accomplish.

PRAGER: It really grew out of her upbringing.

She was raised in a very strict, religious home.

Her parents became Jehovah's Witnesses.

Um, and there were lots of thou shalt nots, but above all, sex was a complicated, um, forbidden thing.

And particularly when Norma, um, came out, um, to her, to her mother and father and really sort of discovered her, um, lesbianism when she was away, um, in a boarding school for "delinquent children".

And her mother told me, I was able to interview her mother, Mary, that she beat her, um, because her daughter was gay.

And Norma pushed that away, but, and she, and she lived sort of who she was, lived authentically I think for a few years.

But Roe complicated that.

Norma was obviously, um, Jane Roe in 1970 when the case was filed, but it wasn't really until the late 1980s that she began to sort of look for the spotlight.

She wanted to be, she wanted to represent this movement.

She wanted to help, um, represent Roe, which she began to call "my law".

And unfortunately for her, she was marginalized by the pro-choice movement.

In fairness to that movement, she was an unreliable narrator.

She had recanted one lie already.

She had said that she had become pregnant, um, um, uh, her preg, the pregnancy that led to Roe she said had come via rape, but that was a lie.

Um, and they didn't trust her.

But still, even after she recanted that lie and worked very hard to sort of promote choice, they didn't really give her a seat at the table.

That was very difficult for her, and she became very angry and disillusioned.

And one way, and I know I'm venturing a little bit off your question.

ZIEGLER: No, that's okay.

PRAGER: But one way that she was able to sort of get back at them, she said, "Oh, yeah?

You're not gonna take me seriously?

Well, I'm gonna make you take me seriously."

And she then switched over to the pro-life side in 19, uh, '95.

Um, and just one note on that.

It wasn't that her conversion was only a way to get back at the pro-choice.

Religion was something that gave her genuine comfort.

But that was a big part of it.

And in terms of, you know, the narrative that she invented for herself, the, the pro-life obviously made great use of this, this born again woman who, um, is leaving the pro-choice side and, and she's no longer gay, and on and on and on.

But she was in the privacy of her home, um, tormented by this, and she actually did what they asked her to do.

She left her partner's bed.

They slept in separate beds after that.

Norma told me that she still had affairs, but she no longer, um, shared the bed of her partner, Connie.

And, and she was really tormented by that until, until the end of her life.

ZIEGLER: One of the things that I was struck by in reading the book is how in some ways, I mean, and this makes me, I wanna ask you about the title, because this makes me, what you said about Norma made me think of the title.

But you, the title is The Family Roe.

It's not just about Norma's family.

It's about how Norma's family and to, to some extent, Norma to embody something about the abortion conflict at large.

Um, something bigger than just their own story.

And so I was hoping you could talk about that, because I think that's one of the most revealing things in the book.

PRAGER: Yeah, I only mentioned the title once in the whole book right at the very end.

I realized that, yes, I was obviously writing about this sort of immediate family, and The Family Roe referred to Norma and her three, um, biological children.

You know, she didn't, she wasn't a mother to them, but the three children she had given birth to.

And then sort of that little, well, there was the four of them, and they were the thort of three Texans I surrounded her, um, with in this sort of telling of the story.

We can talk about them, Mildred Jefferson, Curtis Boyd and Linda Coffee.

But basically, so there were, for me, The Family Roe, it had two meanings.

One was Norma and her children.

And then the tens of millions of people in this country who are sort of, whose lives are connected in some way to abortion and Roe.

They, they devote themselves to one side of this fight.

They feel strongly about it.

And Norma was really the only thing that they had in common.

She was the matriarch in a sense of both of these families.

Families that were otherwise fractured and unbridgeable.

And so it was very helpful for me to sort of keep that larger family in mind while I was writing about Norma and her daughters.

And to just sort of give one example, I look back not only at Norma's life, but at, at her family.

And she, she was born in Louisiana along the Atchafalaya River.

And what I learned was that not only Norma, but her mother and also her grandmother, their lives were also upended by unwanted pregnancies.

In all three of these generations, what happened was it seemed to those women and their families that sex and religion were completely incompatible.

So when one was suddenly pregnant, she was made to sort of marry in great haste, and that had great implications.

The next one, when she found herself unprag, uh, pregnant and, and, and not married, it was very tragic.

This was Norma's mother.

She was made to sort of leave their little town in Louisiana, go to Baton Rouge, give birth to the child, and give that child up.

That child was then raised by her mother.

Um, and these, these, these, these tragedies, really, um, had incredible consequences.

And it is my belief that America at large also struggles with abortion mightily in part, obviously there are other reasons, politics, etcetera, we could talk about, but in part because, again, of this sort of seeming incompatibility of sex and religion.

And so Norma's family and Norma herself, they were this wonderful window into this much larger problem.

ZIEGLER: Yeah, one of the things I love about the book is also that the, the reality of The Family Roe, the larger Family Roe is messy like Norma was, and not clean and easy to categorize the way people wanted, I think, Norma to be.

PRAGER: Yeah.

I don't think.

ZIEGLER: So you mentioned, oh, go ahead.

PRAGER: Yeah, I was just gonna mention one thing about that.

ZIEGLER: Yeah.

PRAGER: I don't think, I don't think this book will be completely satisfying to one side or the other.

ZIEGLER: Right, yeah.

PRAGER: Because it is complicated.

And I didn't decide where the book was going to go.

I followed the book where it went.

And I do think that abortion is fraught for good reason, I do.

And, um, even though I am pro-choice, and I mention that in my author's note, I thought it would be disingenuous not to.

I do think that abortion is complicated for good reason.

On one hand, throughout the humanity of the fetus, the growing fetus.

On the other, the very pressing and real reasons a woman is going to decide that she wants to have an abortion.

And so in writing about these people, I think that those complications, those grays, those nuances, um, came into focus, and you see in very real human terms what that all means.

Um, you, you come to understand and feel for people, and even root for people who are on the other side of the aisle than you.

So I think writing about, I'll just mention, um, one thing about that.

The epigraph of my book comes from my favorite novel, Moby Dick.

And he writes, "See how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them."

It basically, it's very different to be prejudice against a group, um, to, to, to not feel for that group, actually.

If you, what, it's, it's difficult to not feel for someone if you know them.

And, and so I really try to help my reader know these people, and I suffer sort of, you know, I'm not naïve.

I understand what's going on in Texas and in this country.

I understand what's at stake, um, with the supreme court coming up, and it doesn't mean that I don't believe, um, you know, in, in, in a woman's right to choose.

I do, but I also believe, again, that it's complicated.

And my characters enabled me to sort of make that abundantly clear in human terms.

ZIEGLER: Great.

I wanted to talk about some of the other characters, because they're, they're probably less, I mean, uh, not probably, they're certainly less well known than Norma, and that's one of the things I think, and they're all Texans as you mentioned.

PRAGER: Yeah.

ZIEGLER: Which I, I don't think you knew was going to be, uh, as, as topical as it, as it turned out to be.

So I wanted to start with, uh, with Linda Coffee, who some people may be vaguely familiar with, because she was one of the litigators who actually in, was involved in bringing the Roe case, but was often sort of out shown by Sarah Weddington, who most, most readers would probably be familiar with.

So would, would you mind telling me a little bit about how you, why you chose to write about, about Linda and what you learned from her story?

PRAGER: Yeah.

I found it sort of shocking that, that Norma's, you know, Norma had these two lawyers.

And one of them was completely unknown.

Her own, uh, hometown paper called her a historical footnote.

And she was incredibly important.

Um, she was in the early days of Roe, before it was argued in the supreme court, more important than Sarah.

She found their plaintiff.

She filed the suit.

She attached her name to it.

She was very clear that Sarah was understandably uncomfortably doing so at that time.

She also conceived its early legal grounding.

She argued half of the case in the, um, in the, in the lower court, um, but she didn't argue the case in the Supreme Court.

And Sarah Weddington did so, and she did so brilliantly.

Um, and obviously, you know she prepared.

She sort of took over the case at that point.

But Sarah was happy to just say it bluntly to absorb the recognition of two, and Coffee, Linda, was very comfortable ceding that recognition.

And I wanted to sort of restore her to her proper place, but also, again, I wanted to write about the human implications, the human costs of, of what her, um, being the co-council in Roe v. Wade did to her.

When she started, she was a, she was part of the Southern Baptist convention.

She was, um, a traditional Baptist.

And at that time, there was room for her in the SBC.

Um, the SBC was pro-choice, which many people might not believe right now.

I certainly didn't know any of that when I started off writing this book.

Um, and of course, um, it came to a point where not only was there no room for her in her church in terms of abortion, but also in terms of her homosexuality.

Um, she was gay, um, and, and living with her partner in a small town in East Texas in poverty, um, on food stamps, and in a home with no heat.

And so I wanted to sort of tell her story and, and have people know, um, how Roe came into being.

ZIEGLER: Yeah, and one of the other characters I found especially interesting, and probably also important was, was Curtis Boyd who provides abortions.

PRAGER: Yeah.

ZIEGLER: And I think in our, in our abortion politics, we talk a lot about people who provide abortions.

We don't often talk to people who provide abortions, and that's especially I think clear now, um, given what's going on in Texas with SB8.

So would, would you tell me a little bit about, about Curtis's story and why he was important to include in the book?

PRAGER: Yeah.

I wanted to find sort of, you know, one person who could sort of shoulder the load of, um, the world of abortion providers, and in some sense, the whole pro-choice movement.

And he was my guy.

He was incredibly important.

Um, he, too, grew up in a very religious home in Texas.

He's now in his 80s, so he's born in the 30s.

Um, and when he was in high school, his crush, his high school crush, um, got pregnant.

And the, uh, her boyfriend at the time, or I, I, I actually think it was just sort of a, a very quick affair.

He was looked at, said Curtis, as a stud, because his girlfriend was so pretty.

And her life, meantime, was ruined.

Um, she was pariah.

She was excluded from the church, the school, from the community, um, because she had gotten sort of pregnant in high school.

And this made Curtis start to question everything.

Um, and he became an abortion provider and started providing abortions pre-Roe in Texas.

And then, um, I mean, becomes incredibly important just to sort of fast forward.

He rea, he is the, he pioneered the now accepted second trimester, um, method of abortion, dilation and evacuation; one of the pioneers of that.

And then when his friend, um, George Tiller, was murdered, he became what he is now today, the largest provider of third trimester in abortion, of, of abortion in America.

And beyond all of his contributions, and I write about them.

He, he changed sort of the way abortion clinics were conceived of and run.

More even than that, what, what really set him apart in my mind was his complete impenitence about his work.

He looked at abortion as something as only good, a social and moral good, something to empower a woman.

And of course, that's really now where the pro-choice movement is, but he was decades, ahead of that curve.

Um, and so, um, it was complicated following him, his progression from someone who felt that he could not provide abortions, um, to then deciding he would do it.

His first, the first abortion he performed, um, the woman was 10 weeks pregnant, and then following little by little his progression, his emotional and mental progression where he came to feel that he could provide abortions deeper and deeper into pregnancy.

That was something that I thought was very, very important.

ZIEGLER: Hmm.

Yeah, and I, so now we can talk about the character that brought us together.

PRAGER: Yeah.

ZIEGLER: Uh, Mildred Jefferson, who's I think interesting, um, I think because of what her story tell us about race and the racial politics of abortion, um, but also about, about the, the Right to Life movement, because she was, I think, probably the, the face of the movement in some ways, um, for the better part of a decade, and was also I think much more complicated than most people even who studied her knew.

So could you tell me a little bit about Mildred, too?

PRAGER: Yeah, so Mildred was sort of famously the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, very brilliant.

Also from a small town in Texas.

And she then became really it's sort of most remarkable, the, the most remarkable and compelling spokesperson for the pro-life movement in the early years of that movement after Roe.

And she's looked upon as sort of a saint who left behind this, um, career in surgery to, to devote herself to the unborn.

And I wondered sort of what happened there, and I got her FBI file.

There was something fascinating that had happened.

It was misogyny and racism that had sort of done in her career in medicine.

And, and the very same parts of her biography that were such, um, that were, that were so detrimental to her career in medicine were enormous assets in the pro-life world, because she was a black Methodist woman in a movement that was desperate to sort of expand beyond white Catholic men, and I wrote about that.

And what was so interesting to me.

Here's a woman who comes to say that all abortion must be forbidden, must not be allowed, and yet, privately, something fascinating I, I learned from her, from her ex-husband, um, a white man, um, she had met, was almost a decade her junior, and, and been married to for a short time.

Um, she decided that this world was so unjust that she could not bring a child into it.

And so her childlessness, which publicly was at odds with everything she'd, she stood for when she told people that she was not able to conceive, but in fact, she had chosen not to conceive.

And this was the same woman who demanded that every conception lead to, um, a birth.

And so life is complicated, and I wanted to sort of write about these people and present them in, in, in three dimensions.

And, and I was able to find these three Texans, Boyd, Jefferson and Coffee who really enabled me to do so.

ZIEGLER: Right.

And I mean, I, I know we're at a very, I mean it.

You didn't know this in writing the book that the book would come out at a time when abortion was sort of front of mind again and when so much was in flux, but I'm curious, I'm curious what you think is going to happen, but I'm also curious what you think Norma would have made of all of this.

Of course, she's not here to tell us, but you, you knew her better than most.

PRAGER: Yeah, so I'm not gonna say what I think is gonna happen, because I'm in conversation with here.

ZIEGLER: That's my job.

PRAGER: And that's your job.

And you don't know this but.

ZIEGLER: That's why I'm here.

PRAGER: The powers of Ted better than I. I mean, look.

I will just say this.

You know, you can tell people what really will happen.

It's my, it's my simple, my simple sort of understanding is that there's no way the court this conservative court would have taken this case in Dobbs unless they wanted to do something with it.

So whether they're gonna overturn Roe in one fell swoop this fall, it wouldn't shock me.

But my guess is that Roe will remain the law in Maine, at least.

Um, but that, you know, the undoing of Roe is not, is not too far away.

And that basically, Trump will be successful.

He said he was going to appoint justices to the court who would be comfortable overturning Roe, and, and I do believe that ultimately, that's where we're heading.

Um, in terms of Norma.

Norma was very clear with me.

She died just after Trump's election.

She said to me, "That richy-rich is going to get his way."

That's what she said.

She believed, she, she was, she was very, um, she, she paid close attention to Roe.

She felt, as I said, she called it "my law."

And she was proprietary about it.

She, it's interesting.

She, despite starting off, well, let me say it this way.

I know what she really believed, because not only did she tell it to me over and again, but she said so publicly at two fascinating points in her life.

Right after Roe's decision, days later, she was interviewed by a small little publication, The Baptist Press.

And she said that, "I believe abortion ought to be legal through the first trimester."

She said, "After that point, I myself, would feel uncomfortable having an abortion."

And then even after she switched over to the pro-life side and was interviewed on le, on Nightline by Ted Koppel, she said the same exact thing much to the dismay of her friends at Operation Rescue, who then quickly got her in line.

But that's what she believed.

She believed that abortion ought to be legal, but up to a point, um, and, at an earlier point than Roe, itself, allows for.

ZIEGLER: Um, one, one person asks just a simple question, was Norma aware that her mother of the sort of complex family dynamics, um, that, uh, her mother was her sister and her grandmother was her mother, and all of that?

Did, but did that story, did you uncover that story, or was that known to the family before the book?

PRAGER: I uncovered, I uncovered the story about her grandmother and also about her mother, although Norma said that she had a hunch about what had happened with her mother.

But only, these were all, you know, there was such stigma attached that even within their family, it wasn't known.

ZIEGLER: One of the other things that's, that's tricky about this that I, I, I have not had to do in writing history is how to facilitate those conversations, because you're revealing things that are very intimate and, and delicate.

So how did you approach revealing that?

PRAGER: The good thing for me was the book took me 10 years, and one sort of, one sort of perk to that, the incredible passage of time is that I got to know the people in my book very well.

Um, and I'd like to think that they believed in what I was doing.

And so we became very comfortable with each other.

And so I was able to sort of talk about these things, and, and show them the proofs the, that I found, that I wasn't sort of making this up.

For example, remarkably in, there was a bible in the family in which this sort of real names of the mothers and fathers were actually written, um, that I was able to sort of show.

That was, that was just one example.

But also, remarkably, um, the, Mary, who was Norma's mother, before she died, she had told the child she had given birth to that she was her, as she put it, she said, "I'm your mama."

And that daughter, who was actually Norma's half-sister, recalled that conversation to me.

ZIEGLER: That's really interesting, too.

There's a recent, relatively recent, I think, documentary on FX about Norma.

Um, and there's been, I think, a lot of, a lot of distancing or, or ambivalence about the fact that Norma did do things for money right?

I mean, I think it's much more attractive for us, and I mean us, anyone, certainly anyone pro-choice, anyone pro-life, anyone who's ambivalent to think of Norma as a victim of these movements rather than someone who was looking to get paid.

PRAGER: Yeah.

ZIEGLER: And so I'm curious about how you, you approached that, or your feeling about that and how you tried to, to write someone that people could empathize with, notwithstanding the fact that Norma was definitely not just a victim.

PRAGER: Yeah, look.

Norma was definitely exploited by both sides.

I mean, period.

But she also gave as good as she got.

And, um, she turned her plaintiffship into a career.

Um, and remarkably, she sort of navigated very difficult waters, these big personalities and powerful people on both sides of the issue, and she kept reinventing herself.

It wasn't just then that she became sort of evangelical.

She then became Catholic.

And so she was always able to sort of endear herself and speak to, endear herself to a new sort of large community in America and also be paid by that community.

A whole new sort of speaking tour.

She had very little money, but she, but she managed to get by thanks to Roe.

One thing about that documentary, they, they put forward something that was not true.

They said, and it was because Norma said so, that she was paid to switch sides.

She was not paid a dime to switch sides.

Um, she, it is true that she knew, again, in going over to the pro-life side that she would now have a whole new, you know, world to speak to and, and, and, a, a new world of speaking fees, but she was not actually paid, um, to become pro-life.

ZIEGLER: Right.

I mean, I think, yeah, that, that's one of the things I think that people have a hard time with, with Norma, too, that she could, that she could be ambivalent, right, that there, there was no sort of shoe horning, or into, you know, she was actually pro-life or actually pro-choice.

PRAGER: Yeah.

ZIEGLER: And everything else is bogus, right?

I mean, I think.

PRAGER: Yeah.

What she really wanted was to be able to sort of be pro-choice and, and, and yet, sort of express her, her ambivalence.

And she was not, there was no room for that, um, um, on either side and also to be gay.

I mean, it, it was very sad.

They, the pro-life world that's sort of trotted her around, um, at, you know, as this trophy.

I mean, one or.

They, they did not allow her to, to continue to live with Connie as, as we discussed.

So it was very complicated.

And what's really sad is she wanted to live an authentic life, um, and yet in becoming Jane Roe, she really wasn't able to.

ZIEGLER: Right.

And someone had a specific question about Linda Coffee and, and why they were looking for a plaintiff like Norma.

If you could talk a little bit about, um.

PRAGER: Yeah.

ZIEGLER: Kind of situating Linda in the history that goes back a little further.

PRAGER: Yeah.

They definitely, excuse me, were not looking for a plaintiff like Norma.

They weren't.

That's for sure.

They needed a plaintiff.

They needed someone who would say, "I am pregnant.

I want to get an abortion, but I'm not able to."

And she was pregnant in 1969.

Abortion was legal then in a few states, but not in Texas.

Norma did not have the money to fly to California or to D.C., um, and where, where she could have had abortions, or to go south of the border to Mexico where not, where, where many women did, including Norma's own, um, lawyer, Sarah Weddington, as Sarah later wrote about.

Um, so she needed to be able to sort of be, carry the, the, be able to face the publicity.

They, they gave her, um, a pseudonym, but it wasn't assured that, um, she would stay sort of anonymous.

And also she had to have no money.

And Norma didn't even know what a plaintiff was, um, when they spoke to her.

But she decided that even though the odds were slim that she herself was going to get an abortion, she decided she would go through with this, but she was not interested then in furthering a cause.

She only wanted an abortion.

And she held onto the hope that, that doing this, that taking this on, that becoming a plaintiff would enable her to have one.

What infuriated her was that Sarah Weddington did not tell Norma that she, herself, had had an abortion.

And neither Weddington nor Coffee tried, even though it would have been difficult because Norma was then at roughly you couldn't know exactly how far along in a pregnancy you were then, but she was either at her 18th, 19th, 20th week that they did not take any steps to try to help her have an abortion as she wanted to do.

Obviously, she was more valuable to them as a plaintiff.

ZIEGLER: Right.

And someone asked, you know, there's a lot of these characters, obviously are very complicated.

And so one, one of the listeners wanted to know what surprised you the most in researching the book, and that could be, you know, there may be, you know, a small sort of detailed surprise and a bigger picture surprise.

I'm sure there were both kinds.

PRAGER: Wow.

That is a, a good question and a complicated question.

What surprised me the most?

I mean, huh.

I, I think, um, well, one of the things that was very moving to me that sort of leaps to mind was that Norma was desperate, desperate to have it known that she did not have an abortion.

This was at the end of her life.

She was desperate to have it known that she was a mother, as she said, to three children.

Um, and one of her daughters, her eldest child, Melissa, who had suffered at Norma's hand.

Norma was unfit to be a mother, and didn't want to be a mother then.

Um, Melissa nonetheless found it within herself to sort of take care of Norma at the end of Norma's life.

All three of these daughters, all three of her daughters suffered, um, because of Norma.

We already mentioned sort of what was put upon Shelley, um, when she learned who she was when she was 18 years old, just shy of 19.

Well, Jennifer, the middle child, had struggled.

She was very open with me that she had struggled with, um, um, alcohol and drug abuse, and she had overcome those torments.

But she wondered if somehow they had to do with whoever her biological mother was, and it was a great sort of comfort to her when she learned that, yes, um, her biological mother had sort of been through similar things.

And Melissa suffered because she had Norma in her life, and she was desperate to do something that I think was very heroic.

She said, "I'm gonna sort of stop this pattern here of, of women having children who are not fit to be mothers, and if there is one sort of overriding thing that I wish to achieve in my life is to be a mother to my children."

And she has been to this day.

Um, but again, in answer to the question was Norma's, um, real desper, desperation to be known as someone who actually had had children and not had an abortion.

ZIEGLER: Wow.

Yeah, that's, the, the stigma around abortion, then, is really powerful.

PRAGER: Yeah, and I'll add one thing about that that's so interesting.

Norma is always looked at as a person who is obviously synonymous with abortion, but if her life is really kind of a testament to anything, a window into anything, it is, it is the cost of adoption, of being a mother who relinquishes children to adoption.

This was a very difficult thing for her and the pro-life community, which obviously says, "You know, we don't believe in abortion.

A woman should give up her children or relinquish her children, I should say, to adoption."

And they say that actually, they speak about the emotional cost of abortion.

But if anything, studies show, and there are enormous studies that testify to this, it is actually adoption more than abortion that takes a great toll on, on a woman.

And so that was something also that Norma's life brought into focus.

ZIEGLER: One of the, uh, one of the questioners wanted to know what it was like to write about this as, as a man.

How you dealt with that, because I'm sure there's some people who question your ability to tell this story given that.

PRAGER: Yeah, absolutely.

I can tell you that, you know, I mentioned sort of what led me into this story.

It was wanting to know, um, what happened to Norma's youngest child, who she was and if she knew that she had been born to Jane Roe.

And sort of so little by little, my interest then grew from that one child to all the children Norma had given birth to, from there, to Norma herself, to Roe v. Wade, and to all abortion in America.

So I didn't actually dive into this with my eyes wide open.

Had they been wide open, I don't know if I had dived in.

Um, as I wrote it, yes.

I obviously was very aware that this is something that I, myself, in some ways will always sort of only be able at, from a distance.

But you know what?

The protagonists on both sides, they never made me feel that they didn't want me writing this.

Um, that was very helpful to me.

And also, in writing about, um, a lot of the people in the book, I was able to write about what it's like, what it's like for a woman having men constantly make decisions for them, whether it was the nine justices on the Supreme Court, whether it was the American Medical Association, which for so long was only men and were really only, they were the only sort of, they were the deciders of when an abortion could be legal or not, and on, and on, and on.

And so that was something that I made a point as a man over and over and over to sort of bring to light.

Um, so I hope that answers your question.

ZIEGLER: It does, yeah.

Um, and I know, uh, you touched on this briefly, and I don't know if, if readers are aware of this, but the, the Supreme Court, um, has a, a Mississippi case in front of it now, a ban on abortion, um, at 15 weeks that many people expect the court will uphold.

And really the question then becomes, as Josh said, whether the court then reverses Roe sooner, like in the summer of 2022, or maybe in a year or two.

And so I think given that we're, we're kind of on the cusp of a decision potentially overruling Roe, um, how do you think your book kind of helps people understand where we are and where we might be going?

PRAGER: Well, I, I'll answer that briefly, but I also really do think it would be helpful if you spoke to what you think, um, is coming up around the bend.

So just to sort of give you my quick answer about that, I, it's not just sort of a, um, a snappy thing to say that I think people should look at this through, um, people as opposed to politics, meaning abortion and Roe.

I think it's important.

I want to desperately sort of humanize this and get away from these sort of very tidy categories that we sort of, you know, speak about these very complicated, um, issues.

Um, um, you know, we put them in these tidy categories, and that, that doesn't do anyone any good.

And I hope my, my book enables us to sort of maybe pushes us a little bit out of our comfort zones and help us understand exactly how we got here and what's at stake on a very human level.

Um, but, but, you know, tell us a little bit what you think, um, is going to come, um, um, of Dobbs, uh, this case that's going to the Supreme Court.

ZIEGLER: Yeah, I mean I think, I think, as you mentioned, that the, the fact that the court took this case.

There were lots of options as to abortion cases the court could take, and there was always the ever-popular option of not taking any abortion case, which has been often the choice the court makes, um, often for almost a decade at a time in between cases.

So the fact that, and this, the court even in taking this case didn't have to take the most explosive question in this case.

So the fact that the justices took a case that requires them to either rewrite or completely undo Roe tells us a lot, and why does it have to be that way?

Um, Mississippi's law bans abortion at 15 weeks.

Roe says there's a right to choose abortion until viability, as you mentioned, which is when survival outside the womb is possible.

And that's, you know, depending on the hospital and the pregnancy, but give or take 24 weeks.

So far, much after 15 weeks.

So for the court to say Mississippi's law's okay, the court either has to say viability has to go or Roe has to go.

And we know one of those two things is quite likely to happen.

We know, as you mentioned, that there are six justices on the court, have been placed there by presidents who vowed to see Roe overturned, including three by Trump.

And we know that the process of vetting those people is very sophisticated.

So we have no reason to think that those justices won't do what we would expect when the moment comes.

I think after that, though, again, it's probably gonna get complicated and messy the way, um, Norma's story was, because of course the Supreme Court, when Norma's case came down, um, Harry Blackmun believed that Roe, the decision, may help resolve this conflict.

And here we are 50 years later with your, your book, and no end in sight, right?

And so I think, uh, we're likely to see this story continue, right?

There'll be room for, for a sequel I think regardless.

PRAGER: Yeah.

ZIEGLER: Of what the Supreme Court does.

PRAGER: And one of the incredible things that I just, I mean, it was uncanny how often Norma showed up when you were looking at something important regarding abortion in America.

And just to give this example made me think of it right now when you were talking about it.

So the pro-life argument against abortion has sort of morphed over time from focus, being focused on the fetus to being focused on the pregnant woman.

And, and they, the pro-life movement talks about something they call post-abortion syndrome.

And the lawyer who has done as much as anyone to sort of introduce that argument into the judicial system is a man named Allen Parker.

And Allen was actually, he it was a, it was a case where he represented Norma that enabled him to do so where he was seeking to sort of overturn Roe through all of these complicated sort of, um, legal, um, wonky ways that I'm not gonna recount here right now, 'cause I won't do it well.

Um, but it's fascinating.

So Norma, even though she never had an abortion, was actually being used to speak out against the toll that abortion took on women.

And that case was validated, that argument was validated in the, in the case of Gonzales v. Carhart when Justice Kennedy alluded to it, the toll.

He said even though we don't have sort of data to quantify this, it seems sort of logical that a woman would suffer, um, if she has an abortion.

Now, obviously, there are women who have suffered emotionally, but as, um, Reagan's own Surgeon General, Dr. Koop said, that percentage or that effect on the, on a, on a public level is minuscule.

Um, and yet, you know, here it is, um, having made it in, through Norma, made it right up to the Supreme Court.

So her life was just this incredible prism, um, into the world of abortion in America.

ZIEGLER: I think it'll continue to be.

I mean, I think there's a temptation to feel sort of the moment your, by your book, is now because Roe, the decision, won't be with us any longer.

I'm, I'm even skeptical of that, because one of the things that's fascinating both about Norma as a person and Roe as a decision is that they both come to stand for so many different things, right?

I mean, Norma as a symbol was so Protean, and that's true of Roe as a decision, too.

I don't think the Supreme Court could have the final word on who Norma was or what Roe means.

PRAGER: Yeah.

ZIEGLER: And so I expect that if people read your book in a decade, regardless of what the Supreme Court has done, they'll still learn a lot from it.

GRAHAM: Great moderating, Mary.

You know, it really helps when the, when the moderator is as into the subject as the, uh, as the author.

Uh, and Josh, it's, it's as fascinating hearing you talk about how you discovered what you did as it is, uh, reading, reading all the stories.

PRAGER: Thank you.

GRAHAM: As Mary said earlier, you certainly couldn't have known a decade ago when you began working on the book where the, where the abortion issue would be today.

But clearly, the book is, um, is very well timed and will provide important context for all of us as, as Roe and its legacy continue to face challenges in, in the days and weeks ahead.

Um, to everyone watching, thanks for tuning in.

From all of us here at Politics and Prose, stay well and well read.

NARRATOR: Books by tonight's authors are available at Politics and Prose book store locations or online at politics-prose.com.

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