Summary of Joshua Prager's The Family Roe

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of Joshua Prager's The Family Roe in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: Despite her famous pseudonym, “Jane Roe,” no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947–2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life. Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with Norma, discovered her personal papers—a previously unseen trove—and witnessed her final moments. The Family Roe presents her life in full. Propelled by the crosscurrents of sex and religion, gender and class, it is a life that tells the story of abortion in America.

Prager begins that story on the banks of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River where Norma was born, and where unplanned pregnancies upended generations of her forebears. A pregnancy then upended Norma’s life too, and the Dallas waitress became Jane Roe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Dec 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781669341550

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

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Insights on Joshua Prager's The Family Roe

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The Atchafalaya River flows through southern Louisiana and northern Mississippi, and is a major source of hydroelectric power. It was here, in the early 1900s, that a young Acadian named Emar found himself in a bind.

#2

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 displaced hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom were Acadians from Louisiana. They had to leave their homes and everything they knew, and began living in tents.

#3

The Gautreaux family lived on a farm in Louisiana, where they had to work extremely hard.

#4

Bertha had a daughter named Mildred, who got pregnant at 17 and had to leave her family. She went to live with her aunt and uncle in Baton Rouge, where she had a baby girl, Velma, three years later.

#5

After the birth of their third child, Mary, who had been drinking, went into labor. Her baby was born on September 22, 1947, in a clinic reserved for whites only. The baby girl, named Norma Lea Nelson, was four pounds short of seven pounds.

#6

Mary and Olin’s marriage suffered as a result of their religious differences, and they eventually divorced.

#7

When Norma was seven, her mother got her a little sister named Janie. But Janie was a handful, and the family had a difficult time dealing with her behavior.

#8

When she returned home from the reform school, her mother had begun seeing a trucker named Raymond Sandefur, whom she would later divorce. Norma did not want to go back to the way things were, and began drinking and smoking marijuana. She felt differently about religion and sex after going to a reform school.

#9

Sex and religion are not inherently opposed, as Hinduism and Judaism demonstrate. But in America, this view was shaped by the teachings of the Catholic Church, which saw sex as sinful and dangerous, and by the teachings of the Bible, which saw sex as a consequence of sin.

#10

Norma had a difficult time adjusting to life in Texas, but she eventually found love and happiness with Elwood. They were married in 1964, when she was sixteen, and had a daughter two years later.

#11

Norma McCorvey, the woman who would later become known as Jane Roe in the famous Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, became pregnant through a rape and married her boyfriend, Woody. But when she became pregnant, she decided to have an abortion.

#12

When the author told this story on The Today Show, she said that she and her husband had met at a bar, and that she had been enchanted by the woman’s blue jeans, brown eyes, and sweet round face. They got married, had a baby daughter, and lived in a garage.

#13