Thirty years ago, I knew nothing of Roe v. Wade when someone handed me a book titled Abortion and Divorce in Western Law. The author was a pro-life law professor named Mary Ann Glendon. She criticized America for not doing more to help pregnant women and mothers, and quoted an author who observed of abortion that “each side views its cause as sacred, and both are right.” And yet, she barely presented the pro-choice point of view; one reviewer marveled at the “astonishing” one-dimensionality of her arguments. Still, I was twenty and had a column to fill for my college paper. So I blithely echoed the passages in the book that the reader had underlined. Abortion law in the U.S. was extreme, I wrote. It was indifferent to unborn life, and had begotten an industry marked by profit.
Looking back, it is hard for me to understand those words. Setting aside that I disagree with them, I now see, as the sociologist Kristin Luker noted, that such simplicities preclude “coming to terms with real human dilemmas.” Those dilemmas run through this book, “giving voice,” as the legal scholar Laurence Tribe once wrote that we must, “to the human reality on each side of the ‘versus.’ ”
TO WRITE ABOUT ABORTION is to invite accusations of bias. Tripwires abound, beginning with language. As Luker noted: “a choice of words is a choice of sides.” And how even to label those sides?
There are many possibilities. The Associated Press stylebook recommends “anti-abortion” and “pro-abortion rights.” I chose instead “pro-life” and “pro-choice.” I did so because those terms are familiar and because they’re what the two sides call themselves—even though, as Luker notes, both sides consider the terms “a mockery” of what the other is actually about.
Of course, the two sides also disagree on what to call the unborn. To the pro-life, they are, from the moment of conception, children. To my mind, however, a fertilized egg is not a child, even if it will become one. And so, when writing of that growing body which will either be aborted or born, I generally use the word fetus, mindful, as the writer Katha Pollitt notes, that two-thirds of abortions occur by the eighth week of pregnancy, when the abortus is in fact an embryo.
It will thus be said that I have chosen a side. And, indeed, I am pro-choice. But I am not an advocate—a distinction the pro-choice academic Katie Watson made when she wrote a book about abortion. I am a journalist. And writing this book, I strove to be as sympathetic to the pro-life as the pro-choice.
THE REALIZATION THAT Jane Roe had not had an abortion—that somewhere there was a Roe baby—was what led me into this book. My interest, however, quickly spread from that one child to all three children Jane Roe had borne. From them it grew to include Jane Roe herself, Roe v. Wade, and the whole of abortion in America.
I could not tell that larger story through Norma McCorvey and her daughters alone. And so, I found three people in Texas who would enable me to do so: the abortion provider Curtis Boyd, the lawyer Linda Coffee, and the pro-life advocate Mildred Jefferson. Their lives, alongside Norma’s, reach into every corner of what abortion in America has become.
Dozens more characters entered the book, beginning with the movement leaders who worked with Norma on both sides of Roe. They were a difficult lot. Sarah Weddington would not speak with me. Randall Terry called me “a criminal.” I told myself that if Norma could handle them, so could I.
When I met Norma in 2013, she was sixty-six years old. Her memory was faded, and also obstructed by the various stories she had told. But, in time, she welcomed my interest in her life. And she tried to help, thrilled, for example, when the name of the deceased man who had fathered her youngest came to mind.
I was helped as well by a thrilling find: in early 2011, I discovered Norma’s private papers in the garage of the home where she’d lived with Connie. After Connie gave them to me, I asked Norma if she wanted them. She did not. She sold them to me instead, and after she died, I engaged a broker to sell them (along with other documents I uncovered in my research), to a research library at Harvard. After I finished the book, I gave the net proceeds of the sale to Norma’s daughters.
Those three women were active participants in the book. Delighted that I had brought them together—her “happiest moment in life,” reflected Jennifer on Facebook—they wished to help me write their stories. So they invited me to important events from weddings to memorials, and communicated with me hundreds of times. Shelley, meantime, mindful of her secret, instructed me to speak to no one about her without her prior consent, and I complied. Ultimately, she wanted it known that the decision to tell her story was her own. “I want everyone to understand,” she told me in 2019, “that this is something I’ve chosen to do.” When the book was done, I asked the sisters to review with me the passages in which they appeared. They did so to differing degrees, and offered up a handful of emendations, which I incorporated. Each blessed the book, and said it was “accurate.” “You’ve done great,” Melissa added kindly. They were ready to step forward.
BEFORE THIS BOOK, people knew, of course, who Norma McCorvey was. They knew, too, that Linda Coffee filed Roe, and that Mildred Jefferson and Curtis Boyd fought on either side of it. But if people knew something of their work, they knew next to nothing of them. Among much else, they didn’t know that Coffee was not only brilliant and feminist but gay and destitute, living in a heatless house in East Texas. Or that Boyd—sixty years after seeing a schoolmate ruined by an unwanted pregnancy—had come to determine that the law must never force a pregnant woman to birth a child. Or that it was prejudice, more even than conviction, that had led Jefferson to leave medicine for abortion—racism and misogyny so overt that she who publicly safeguarded the unborn had come, privately, to consider this world too unjust to bear a child of her own.
It took me time to uncover these things. People reveal themselves gradually, the dead too; though I’d come to know Jefferson through her papers at Harvard, what brought her to life were her FBI file and divorce record and ex-husband, sources it took me years to find. It took years to find Coffee, too. She had given just one in-depth interview since speaking with a student at Baylor in 1973. And even after I found her in Mineola, Texas, another fifteen months passed before we spoke. The night before we met in 2014, her partner presented me with a sheaf of papers, among them the personals ad that had brought Coffee to her, and the sad record of Coffee’s arrests.
I thus saw again and again that if Roe was “undoubtedly the best-known case” the Supreme Court had ever adjudicated, as the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin wrote, its protagonists remained unknown. Secrets, in fact, abounded. Some were small: the mistaken memory of a passage in a book that inspired Nellie Gray to found the March for Life. Some were not so small: the lie Sarah Weddington told, that Norma had carried her pregnancy to term so as to protect Roe. Some were important: the memo, written in 1991 by a Supreme Court clerk, that prefigured the 5-4 Casey ruling, and had not been quoted before. And one was deeply affecting.
I FOUND THE BIRTH DATE of the Roe baby in those papers Norma had left behind. But Norma’s child did not yet wish to meet with me when, in late 2011, I readied to board a flight to Dallas to look for Norma’s mother. I didn’t know where in Dallas Mary was. But my research assistant, Susannah Brooks, knew from property tax records that, a few months previously, Mary had been living in a Dallas trailer park. Mary was no longer there, and I guessed that she’d moved to an assisted-living facility. Susannah gave me the names of twenty-nine such facilities in Dallas that took Medicaid or Medicare. Awaiting my flight, I made my way down the list, phoning each facility to ask if it housed a woman named Mary Sandefur. Number twenty-three did: the Renaissance at Kessler Park.
Mary didn’t tell me that she’d borne another daughter besides Norma. But three years later, that other daughter did, Velma recalling over seafood in Simmesport that Mary had phoned her back in 1983. “She said,” Velma told me in early 2015, “ ‘I’m your mama.’ ”
Velma and I drove from the restaurant to her home. There, on a bank of the Atchafalaya, she handed me the marriage certificate of the grandparents who had raised her. Bertha had wed Emar on July 15, 1922—six months before she gave birth to Mary. The document thus revealed another family secret: Bertha was pregnant at the altar, the first of three generations redirected by unwanted pregnancy, by the irreconcilability of sex and religion.
It was helpful to view Norma within the context of her family. And yet, her life resisted rendering. She had cloaked it in lies; her two autobiographies were fiction. Among much else, she wrote that a nun raped her, that a cousin raped her, that a trio of strangers raped her, that her husband beat her, that her mother kidnapped her child, that she went to an illegal clinic to get an abortion only to find it caked in blood, that she became Jane Roe because her lawyers got her drunk and didn’t tell her what an abortion was, that she was shot at because she was Jane Roe, that she helped to perform unsafe abortions. None of it was true.
In writing Norma’s story, I searched always for her earliest interview; before conjuring that bloody abortion clinic, for example, she revealed, in the early 1980s, that she’d found an illegal abortion provider but was scared to go to him. I searched as well for credible witnesses to her life, finding a few dozen people who, like her friend Andi Taylor, told me what Norma did not—that, for example, Norma had just birthed her second child, not her third, when a nurse accidentally handed the baby to her. It was hard to find these people. Andi happened to be at Cherries, a gay bar in Dallas, when, in 2012, the bartender read aloud a note I’d placed in a gay paper asking anyone who’d known Norma to get in touch. Thus did Norma’s sixty-nine years take shape in these pages.
In October 2020, almost four years after I alerted the country that Jane Roe had died, her daughter Melissa phoned me in New Jersey to say that she would soon sprinkle Norma’s ashes in Louisiana. I wanted to be there. But I did not want to fly; the country was steeped in Covid. (It would soon take the lives of Norma’s half-sister and brother-in-law, Velma and Robert having fallen sick beside the Atchafalaya.) And so, on a Monday morning at dawn, I backed out of my driveway, off to drive 2,800 miles in five days. The next night, in a trailer park in Mississippi, I read online that a hurricane was bearing down on the Gulf Coast.
I could only laugh. I had been at work on the book for almost eleven years, and none of it had been easy. It had, in fact, exhausted me. But I would do it again. As the great Neil Sheehan reflected to his wife upon completing his opus about the Vietnam War: “I saw more of our daughters than most fathers do, and I wrote the book I wanted to write.’’
New Jersey
June 2021