While the History Group usually focuses on significant past occurrences,
everyone agreed that the attempted violent insurrection on January 6
constituted such a past and future threat to our Democracy that we should
study the book Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. Everyone agreed
that Peril was a well written and well documented account of these events.
In March, (finally after fifty years) the real people behind Roe V. Wade are
revealed. Families were afflicted by alcohol and drugs. There was never an
abortion.
The opposition to Roe V. Wade is rising and faces a conservative Supreme
court.
FROM BOOKSHARE.ORG
A masterpiece of reporting on the Supreme Court's most divisive case, Roe v.
Wade, and the unknown lives at its heart. 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. Drawing on a decade of
research, Prager reveals the woman behind the pseudonym, writing in
novelistic detail of her unknown life from her time as a sex worker in
Dallas, to her private thoughts on family and abortion, to her dealings with
feminist and Christian leaders, to the three daughters she placed for
adoption. Prager found those women, including the youngest-Baby Roe-now
fifty years old. She shares her story in The Family Roe for the first time,
from her tortured interactions with her birth mother, to her emotional first
meeting with her sisters, to the burden that was uniquely hers from
conception. The Family Roe abounds in such revelations-not only about Norma
and her children but about the broader "family" connected to the case.
Prager tells the stories of activists and bystanders alike whose lives
intertwined with Roe. In particular, he introduces three figures as
important as they are unknown: feminist lawyer Linda Coffee, who filed the
original Texas lawsuit yet now lives in obscurity; Curtis Boyd, a former
fundamentalist Christian, today a leading provider of third-trimester
abortions; and Mildred Jefferson, the first black female Harvard Medical
School graduate, who became a pro-life leader with great secrets. An epic
work spanning fifty years of American history, The Family Roe will change
the way you think about our enduring American divide: the right to choose or
the right to life.
Journey THROUGH HISTORY meets monthly on the first Tuesday at 8:00
PM ET.
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Don Queen
