Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

One of NPR’s Best Books of 2021

A New York Times Notable Book of 2021

One of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2021

Finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

Reviews

“The scope is sweeping, the writing is beautiful. It’s an epic story worthy of the impact this one case has had on the American psyche.”

—MICHEL MARTIN, NPR

“ In the journalist Joshua Prager’s ardently reported and painfully timely epic, ‘The Family Roe,’ Jane Roe is both heroine and villain — and a paragon of human complexity. If you like your stories the way too many of us now do — pat, with the narrative reverse-engineered to validate your priors — this book is not for you. But it is if you want an honest glimpse into the American soul, into the foul and sometimes fruitful marriage of activism and commerce, into the ways in which people can be and believe contradictory things, into the inner and outer lives of women squelched and tossed by reproductive tyranny.”

—ANAND GIRIDHARADAS, The New York Times Book Review

“ [A] prodigiously researched, richly detailed, sensitively told account of McCorvey’s strange, and very American, odyssey…. It's like a fairy tale set in working-class America.”

—MARGARET TALBOT, The New Yorker

“Mr. Prager’s book is stupendous, a masterwork of reporting…. If you want to understand Roe more deeply before the coming decision, read it.”

—PEGGY NOONAN, The Wall Street Journal

“… essential 4 understanding #roevswade & #reproductive health laws in USA. #ethics & #legal & class studies profs take note. No simple Good vs Bad fairytales!”

—MARGARET ATWOOD, Twitter 

“Through rigorous reporting and sensitive portrayals, Prager animates Roe’s leading and supporting figures and remakes our understanding of them.... interweaving in-depth biographical sketches to transform Roe from an abstract legal doctrine into an epic family saga…. In the end, Prager gives us neither heroes nor villains. He elicits our empathy toward almost everyone in his cast of characters. That’s no easy feat when our inclination is to see each person through our partisan eyes. Prager’s reportage destabilizes our righteousness, disarms our sense of outrage and offers us a breather, even as Roe v. Wade may be taking its last breaths.”

—MINDY JANE ROSEMAN, The Washington Post

"Other books give us the sobering facts and mounting stakes: 'The Family Roe' is a reminder that reproduction is, at its core, an elemental human drama.”

—MATTIE KAHN, The New York Times

“Journalist Joshua Prager offers a masterclass in reporting in his book The Family Roe, which weaves concentric rings of activists and Christian fundamentalists, lawyers and Harvard Medical School graduates—groups called to action in the fiery debates over the case—to reveal a rich tapestry of American life and values in the 20th-century.”

—TIME

“The Family Roe: An American Story is a masterpiece of journalistic research…. Prager challenges readers’ presuppositions and refuses to fit the book’s messy stories into clear moral categories. Things (and people) are not always what they seem. Nearly all the people profiled in this book carry deep secrets that they refuse to reveal to others—but that Prager, as a master journalist, repeatedly succeeds in uncovering.”

—DANIEL K. WILLIAMS, Christianity Today

“Prager’s book does more than educate the reader on legal history; it shows how one changes over a lifetime. It is a study of the human experience…. Prager reminds the reader that stances on abortion can be as fluid and complex as the generations-long battle over it. He offers no hint of his own political standing and ultimately leaves his complete history of Roe open to every reader.”

—VESPER NORTH, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Nuanced, fine-grained, and gripping, this is a masterful study of the human lives behind a landmark case.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Prager’s book is not just a biography but also political history…. Prager excels in revealing the messy, complicated people at the heart of America’s abortion fight; their motives, he seems to say, are much more tangled than any of them would likely admit.”

—MARIN COGAN, The New Republic

“A stunning read.”

—KATHY WISE, D Magazine

“Extraordinary reporting…. Prager’s narrative contains multitudes.”
—CHRIS HAMMER, The Christian Century

“The Family Roe is a work of deep empathy without sentimentality, a recovery of fact over myth, a quintessentially American story.”
—LINDA GREENHOUSE, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist

“A prizeworthy masterpiece of poignant history, an emotionally compelling account of the profound issues that surround reproductive choice.”
—DAVID J. GARROW, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Liberty and Sexuality

“Joshua Prager has humanized the story of how abortion came to be legalized in the United States— and how it came to shape the American culture wars…. The book reads like detective fiction.”
—ANDREW SOLOMON, National Book Award–winning author of Far From the Tree 

“The Family Roe is the definitive historical account of Roe v. Wade and the human stories behind the headlines. Joshua Prager tells these stories with respect and backs his writing with stunning research. I write this as one who seeks to defend the unborn and end the abortion industry in America. But everyone who cares about abortion in America—on both sides—must read this book and then get back to the argument. The Family Roe is a remarkable achievement.”
— R. ALBERT MOHLER, JR., President, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

“Deeply reported and beautifully written…. Prager powerfully refutes the idea that women should have to win a morality contest in order to ‘deserve’ access to abortion.”

— LAUREN GUTTERMAN, Slate

“The Family Roe is an eminently valuable read.”

— MARIA MCFADDEN MAFFUCCI, Human Life Review

"With a novelist’s grace, Prager shows how the narratives we use to justify our personal decisions and our politics too often fail to make room for our own and others’ unresolved ambivalence, messy realities, and human frailty."

—LARA FREIDENFELDS, Nursing Clio

“In this stirring achievement of reportage, a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize, Prager mines scores of interviews with McCorvey and other players in the legal case (including Baby Roe, now a middle-aged woman), his gorgeous prose illuminating the eye of a Category 5 cultural hurricane.”

—Oprah Daily

“In his extraordinary book, Joshua Prager uses more than a decade of reporting to paint an intimate, in-depth picture of McCorvey’s maddeningly complex life, her activism for and then against abortion, and the characters that used her — and whom she used right back.”

— ANDREA GONZÁLEZ- RAMÍREZ, The Cut