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--:-- Shamita Basu: This is In Conversation from Apple News Today. I'm Shamita Basu. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 50 years ago, a case came before the Supreme Court that would forever change U.S. history. We hear arguments in number 18, Roe against Wade. What a lot of people don't know is the woman at the center of that case never got the abortion she was seeking. The ruling took too long.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And all of a sudden a light bulb went off in my head and I said to myself, wow, that means that somewhere a child was born, a child whose conception occasioned the lawsuit Roe v. Wade. That's Joshua Prager. He's a journalist.
--:-- Joshua Prager: When he learned about this 10 years ago, he decided he was going to find out who that child grew up to be. He ended up spending hundreds of hours with Jane Roe herself, whose real name is Norma McCorvey. And he tracked down the three daughters she had and gave up for adoption. The last was the baby at the center of Roe v. Wade.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Prager's new book is called The Family Roe, an American Story. You can read a piece adapted from his book about the woman whose life has been one of the most debated in American history. That article is in The Atlantic on Apple News+.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Norma was not the perfect spokesperson for the movement. In fact, she ended up championing different sides of the abortion debate at different times in her life. And she spoke about having regrets.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I've done a lot against his teachings. I think the far greater sin that I did was to be the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade. In my conversation with Joshua Prager, he explained Norma's complicated views on abortion are what makes her story so worthy of understanding.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Norma McCorvey was born in 1947 in Louisiana into a very religious home. She moved to Texas when she was a toddler. And Norma's mother, Mary, interestingly enough, had gotten pregnant when she was a teenager. She was not yet married. And she was then made in a horrible way to relinquish that child to her mother and then sort of pretend that the child wasn't hers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that had a devastating effect on Mary. She became an alcoholic soon thereafter. And by the time Norma came along and was growing up in this home, Mary was sleeping with many men other than her husband. It was a very difficult place to be growing up.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Norma also was gay and she had been sent off to various schools for sort of quote-unquote delinquent children and had had affairs with, you know, just sort of fun young flings relationships with some of her fellow female students.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And she felt sort of free and unburdened and able to be herself when she was out of the home. But back home, that was impossible. She was beaten for being a lesbian, her mother said, for being a whore, her mother called her.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And Norma then left the home. And in the 1960s, late 1960s, she was a free spirit, doing a lot of drugs, selling drugs. She was even, sadly for a time a prostitute. That took a great toll on her.
--:-- Joshua Prager: She had tried to commit suicide a few times, but she was open about her sexuality. She's a late teenager at this point, right? That's right. Exactly.
--:-- Joshua Prager: She turned 20 in 1967. She got married when she was 16, briefly, had a child. And she later told people that her husband beat her. That was not true. Norma lied a lot.
--:-- Joshua Prager: The marriage ended because he was cheating on her. She gave that child up for adoption to her own mother in an interesting sort of echo of what happened with her mother.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And so her mother was raising her daughter. The daughter did not know who her real mother was. But she lied about that too, by the way. She told people that her mother, quote unquote, kidnapped her child, which was ridiculous.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And she then had another child. And that child was also given up for adoption, placed for adoption with a family she didn't know. And then she got pregnant again. And that third pregnancy was what led to Roe.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And at that time, Norma was a waitress in a lesbian bar in Dallas and was basically desperate not to have to go through pregnancy again and also the relinquishment of another child. And she just wanted to have an abortion.
--:-- Joshua Prager: But of course, abortion was not legal in Texas. So let's talk about Roe v. Wade and the development of that case and sort of where these two stories start to meet.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For all that we talk about Roe v. Wade, I'm sure a lot of people don't know all the details of the case itself. So can you kind of lay out for us how it came together and how it made its way to the Supreme Court?
--:-- Joshua Prager: Absolutely. So as we said, abortion was not legal in Texas. In the first few months of 1970, it would actually become legal in a few states, including New York. And it was already legal in California, actually, signed into law by none other than Ronald Reagan, the governor.
--:-- Joshua Prager: But you needed money to get to these states, and Norma had no money. And there was a lawyer named Linda Coffey. She was a brilliant young lawyer, and she wanted to challenge the laws in Texas that barred abortion.
--:-- Joshua Prager: But she didn't know where she was going to find a plaintiff to do so. And she happened to know from law school a man named Henry McCluskey and McCluskey happened to be it so often this way these sort of serendipitous turns in history.
--:-- Joshua Prager: He happened to be the adoption lawyer who was brokering the adoptions of Norma's children. And when Norma came to him to arrange the adoption of her not yet born third child, and she sort of said, I really want to have an abortion. I don't want to go through with this.
--:-- Joshua Prager: He said, well, it's interesting. I happen to know a woman named Linda Coffey who was looking for a plaintiff. Norma said, what is a plaintiff? And Henry explained that it's someone who brings a lawsuit.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And he asked, would you like to meet Linda? She said, yes, I would. It was Coffey who named Norma Jane Rowe. And on behalf of their anonymous plaintiff, she filed suit in March of 1970.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And this was complicated for her because at that point, she didn't care at all about abortion rights. She simply wanted one. The case then went to the Supreme Court, and it was decided in January 1973, at which point, of course, the child who had been born to Norma was now a toddler, two and a half years old, being raised by a man and woman who had no idea that their child was connected to this case.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Wow. Now, Norma McCorvey herself died a few years ago, but I understand you spent hours with her, talking with her about her story, researching for this book. What did she tell you about the years after Roe v. Wade and the ways in which she chose to continue to speak publicly about abortion?
--:-- Joshua Prager: Norma had told a lot of lies. And Norma had also been used by both sides of this war. And so kind of wasn't even sure of what had actually happened. So together, we spent many, many hours, hundreds of hours over the last four years of her life, figuring it all out.
--:-- Joshua Prager: I'll just mention, as an aside, I found her private papers. Those papers had never been seen before. They were in the garage of her former partner's home. A woman named Connie Gonzalez, she had been with off and on for three decades. The papers were about to be thrown out because the home had been foreclosed on.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And those papers helped me to sort of follow through the facts of Norma's life, finding people who could fill in all the little missing pieces. Wow, that trove of documents sounds like an investigative journalist's dream, right?
--:-- Shamita Basu: You must have been very excited to stumble into that and to have that source.
--:-- Joshua Prager: I'm curious, Joshua, how did you work with Norma as an unreliable narrator of her own story? It really sounds like you're in a position where you have to judge sincerity.
--:-- Joshua Prager: Yeah, that's a great point. And I did not rely upon sincerity. I made sure that every detail was true. So how did I do that?
--:-- Joshua Prager: So for example, one of the many, many lies that Norma told over the years, just to choose sort of a random one was that when she was pregnant that third time and she wanted an abortion and she couldn't get one and her doctor refused to perform one, which is all true, she then went to an illegal abortion clinic and got there and there was dried blood on the floor and it reeked of death, et cetera, et cetera.
--:-- Joshua Prager: Now, none of that was true. What was true, and I know it was true because she said this in two little interviews that no one had paid attention to decades before, just in the beginning of the 1980s, she said that in fact, she had found an abortion provider to go to, legal of course, but sort of safe and reputable, but she could not afford the $500 fee.
--:-- Joshua Prager: So that was the truth. And so one thing that I did was to go back and search through every record possible to see if Norma had mentioned something contrary to what she later said publicly, but just sort of many, many years before, before she became a public person and before this narrative started to overtake her life.
--:-- Joshua Prager: But even more than that, what I did was I relied upon those papers to find people who knew Norma. And so, for example, I mentioned the lie Norma said that her mother had kidnapped her daughter from her.
--:-- Joshua Prager: Well, I found a woman named Glenda Hyman, who was Norma's first living girlfriend, first serious girlfriend. They were living together when Norma had just given birth to that first child and still had her. And Glenda remembered in enormous detail and with sort of true precision, she remembered Norma pleading with her mother, Mary, to take that child off of her hands and said, I don't want to be a mother.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And in fact, at that point also, Mary was still alive and she confirmed that for me too. So it was a combination of finding early, early sources and finding people who were there, who were eyewitness to this, who could then tell me what actually happened.
--:-- Joshua Prager: I would then go back to Norma and say, Norma, you know, this isn't really what happened, is it? And then she would sometimes laugh and say, oh, I prefer my version. That's what she said.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Norma's views on abortion changed over time. And what did she tell you about why they changed?
--:-- Joshua Prager: Norma's views on abortion were privately remarkably consistent. Publicly, they changed radically. So privately, a few days after Roe was decided in 1973, she gave her first ever interview to a little place called the Baptist Press.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And the Baptist Press interviewed Norma. And Norma said, I believe in abortion through the first trimester. I think it should be legal for the first three months of pregnancy. But after that, I would feel very uncomfortable being part of an abortion.
--:-- Joshua Prager: Then after her rebirth her Christian rebirth she said on air to Ted Koppel in 1995 the exact same thing. This horrified her friends at Operation Rescue the people who had brought her over to the pro side that she said this that she believed in abortion through the first trimester but she did.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And in that way, in representing what she called the mushy middle, she actually spoke for the great majority of Americans, because despite the polarization and the politicization of abortion in this country, the great majority of Americans actually have very consistent views on this.
--:-- Joshua Prager: That has not changed either. and Norma represented them. But publicly, Norma said radically different things.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You've said how Norma has been described as a plaintiff that was imperfect in a lot of ways. Even some people have gone so far as to say that she was not good for the cause.
--:-- Joshua Prager: Yeah. What's your assessment of that?
--:-- Joshua Prager: It's a really good question. You know, I think life is messy and untidy. And in a sense, Norma, you could say was actually the perfect plaintiff. Because if you believe in a right to abortion, you don't only believe in the right to abortion for a person who agrees with you on everything.
--:-- Joshua Prager: You believe that anybody should have the right to abortion. Norma, in that sense, better represents the beliefs of the pro-choice movement. And not only that, she definitely better represents America at large than anybody who might have been sort of handpicked by the pro-choice movement, because she was ambivalent about abortion.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And the great majority of Americans are as well. You know, the pro-life movement, obviously, we all know has gone veered incredibly to the right. They are a movement now dominated by extreme voices, as is evidenced by what's happening in Texas.
--:-- Joshua Prager: But the pro-choice movement has also gone much more extreme. So for example, whereas President Clinton had once said that abortion, famously he said, ought to be safe, legal, and rare, now the pro-choice movement does not want to use that word rare.
--:-- Joshua Prager: Why should it be rare? They say abortion is a social and a moral good. It empowers women, and obviously that's true. But it is something that is nonetheless the ending of a fetal life. And so that is not something I think that if anyone is truly honest with themselves and thinking about in the privacy of their own homes, of course we would want that to be rare, all things being equal.
--:-- Joshua Prager: They're never equal, but why would you not want that? And so Norma embodied the realities of abortion much better than either extreme.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn now to the story of her third child, the child who was at the center, I guess, of the Roe v. Wade case in many ways. And really, it's a bit of a blockbuster revelation that we're now learning who she is through your reporting, an excerpt of which was published in The Atlantic.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tell us about Shelley Lynn, who ended up being adopted by a couple. What was her upbringing like?
--:-- Joshua Prager: So Shelly grew up, she was adopted by a woman named Ruth, who was married as a very young woman living on an army base in Texas. And she then ran off, even though she was a newlywed, with the brother of another wife on the base.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And a bunch of years later, they decided that they wanted to have a child, Ruth was not able to conceive. And Ruth told Shelly that she had been adopted, but she didn't know from whom. The only thing she had been told was that Shelly had two half sisters, that her biological mother had also given birth to two other girls.
--:-- Joshua Prager: What then happened was Shelly was a teenager and had just graduated high school and was about to start secretarial school when a woman jumped out of a van in a parking lot where Shelly was walking and said, I was sent by your biological mother to find you.
--:-- Joshua Prager: Now, initially, Shelly was thrilled. She had always wondered who her biological mother was. But very quickly, when this woman, whose name was Toby Hanft, had dinner with her along with Toby's sort of business associate, it.
--:-- Joshua Prager: She realized the truth. They told her that they had been hired not only by Norma, but by the National Enquirer, and that they were going to be doing a story on Norma and her long-lost daughter. They were going to go ahead with it no matter what.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And this was devastating to Shelly. They ended up doing the story, not mentioning her name, but it was horrible because suddenly Shelly felt that she carried an enormous secret, that if people knew who she was, they wouldn't care to know her, they would only care that she was connected somehow to Roe or Norma.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And she was really overwhelmed by that. And it came to divide her life into sort of before and after. And for decades, she was petrified that she would sort of be uncovered.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And she also had grown up in a family that was very anti-choice. And she suddenly sort of had to examine that. And she came to realize that she didn't feel that religion or the government should sort of be involved in this.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And she felt it was a personal decision. And even though she said she herself knew that she didn't want to have an abortion, she didn't think that other women shouldn't be able to. She believed in a right to choose.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And a few years later, she was engaged to marry, but not yet married, was then pregnant. And even though it sort of upturned her life, she went ahead and carried her child.
--:-- Joshua Prager: Because as I say, she didn't want to have an abortion herself. And the real reason there is because doing so in her mind would have made her no different than Norma, who had wanted to abort her.
--:-- Joshua Prager: It was a very complicated thing. And she had had one conversation with Norma on the phone. Norma had wanted to get together with her. At the time Norma asked if she and her partner Connie could come and see Shelly Shelly had a little boy at that time.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And Shelly was uncomfortable with that fact that Norma was gay And she asked if Connie could not come as well. They got into a fight. And then Norma said, you need to thank me. And Shelly said, why?
--:-- Joshua Prager: And she said, for not aborting you. And when that happened, obviously Norma had wanted to have an abortion. When that happened, Shelly said, this is when I called it quits. I knew I never wanted to sort of meet this person.
--:-- Joshua Prager: At the very end, Shelly had this sort of remarkable feelings of compassion for her biological mother, feeling bad for her, feeling that she had lived a life defined by abortion.
--:-- Joshua Prager: Shelly found this sort of incredible grace within her. And yet she could not bring herself to meet this woman. And Norma died having never met Shelley.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, you've talked to Norma, you've talked to her daughters. How do you see the language that we use when we talk about abortion rights having evolved from the 1960s and 70s to now?
--:-- Joshua Prager: Well, it's become a much more sort of politicized issue. It was a fascinating thing for me to realize. I didn't know this. That Roe, when it first became law. It was a 7-2 majority on the court, obviously, that ruled on Roe.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And it was just sort of assumed that it would become part of the landscape. So for example, the first time a Supreme Court justice was appointed to the court after Roe, Justice Stevens, he wasn't even asked about it at his confirmation hearings.
--:-- Joshua Prager: Now that's all they're asked about. It wasn't divided along political lines. There were plenty of Republicans who were pro-choice, largely because they had concerns of overpopulation.
--:-- Joshua Prager: There were plenty of Democrats who were pro-life, including huge names like Senator Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, who was Catholic and felt uncomfortable with it. But little by little by little, Roe, for various reasons that I describe in the book, became this tip of this ideological iceberg that separated our country into two.
--:-- Joshua Prager: But it took a few decades for that transformation to happen, for Roe to become this unbelievably politicized thing where now all Republicans are pro-life, all Democrats are pro-choice.
--:-- Joshua Prager: Now, obviously, it is, I think, our single most polarizing issue in America. And just to sort of say, what motivated me in writing this book, aside from sort of finding the Roe Baby and, you know, how that grew into this larger book, I am pro-choice.
--:-- Joshua Prager: I mentioned that in my author's note. I'm unequivocally so. But I also think that it is a big problem in this country, the way abortion is spoken about. and I did not write this book as sort of a manifesto or a screed.
--:-- Joshua Prager: I wrote this book to humanize the issue and I was very fair to both sides. Empathy is an important thing and I think if you really get to know somebody and you understand why they're in the situation they're in, how they got there, you suddenly can sort of understand the other side a lot more than if you're reading some essay about it.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And there are people in this book who you will come to root for and they don't agree with you about abortion, but they're human beings and you understand them. The epigraph of the book is from Moby Dick, my favorite book.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And he writes, see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them. That basically, if you know somebody, if you love somebody, it's very difficult to be prejudiced against that group of people.
--:-- Joshua Prager: And so I stripped away the propaganda and there was a lot of BS on both sides, to be perfectly honest, and stripped away the rhetoric. And I told these stories and you say, hey, I think I understand a lot better how abortion came to be what it is in America today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Joshua, not to point out the obvious, but you are a man. I guess I'm just curious what this experience was like for you, writing a book that so much centers around the lives of these women and the choices that they could or could not make around abortion.
--:-- Joshua Prager: Yeah, you know, I hadn't even thought about that when I dived in a decade ago. I knew that I was looking for the identity of one person. And then it just sort of, it grew from one of Norma's children to all of her children to Norma to Roe v. Wade to abortion in America just kept going.
--:-- Joshua Prager: I didn't know that much about Roe v. Wade before I started and now obviously I do I understand the sort of criticism that hey you're a man how is it that you could fully write about this well
--:-- Joshua Prager: I think if a person sort of dives into an issue and they educate themselves and they inform themselves and that person should be able to tell that story and that's really why I feel that I was able to do this, because if there's one thing more than anything that I'd like to think defines my work, it is empathy, a desire to try to genuinely let that person communicate for herself what it is that she was feeling.
--:-- Joshua Prager: My eyes were opened through these stories, and this book really was the result of my wanting to do something about it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Joshua Prager is the author of The Family Row, An American Story. His book is out now. Joshua, thank you for bringing us this incredible story.
--:-- Joshua Prager: Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
