Prager’s book provides a provocative look at Roe v. Wade, challenging us to rethink what we know about the case. He delves into the protagonists, the court decision and the social movements surrounding it. Through rigorous reporting and sensitive portrayals, Prager animates Roe’s leading and supporting figures and remakes our understanding of them. He elicits sympathy for many difficult personalities ... By inviting us into their lives, Prager asks us to withhold judgment about their decisions and to reflect on the social and personal pressures underlying their actions. But he has no illusions that the debate over abortion will ever be anything but acrimonious ... Prager’s research is deep and meticulous ... 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.

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 ... heart-wrenching corpus of evidence of how women’s lives 'are redirected by unwanted pregnancy' ... Prager’s scope is giant, and, like any gathering of family, sometimes it’s too much. The stories are beautifully rendered, but the mind loses track of characters ... It’s at once impressive and excessive, and, while all the detail slows the narrative, I also understand it. For it is in the sheer volume of disparate stories that you appreciate the colossal cost of tying women for decades to the consequences of encounters that might have lasted a half-hour (at best) and may or may not have been meaningfully chosen ... What Prager is attempting is risky ... it seems as valiant an effort as someone could make to understand from without, an effort to praise—and, on this issue, in this moment, an effort more men must make.

Prager is not unsympathetic to McCorvey, but he sees her clearly ... He paints a believable portrait of a woman who cared about flirting and fun, seduction and sex, attention and affirmation...but not about ideology, or politics, or anybody else’s rights, really, let alone their souls ... Prager got an astonishing array of people to talk to him for this book ... The book is most compelling, though, when it’s relating the personal saga of a woman and her family caught in the gears of history ... Its drive comes from Prager’s efforts to track down the three daughters whom McCorvey gave up for adoption ... It’s like a fairy tale set in working-class America, each sister carrying a secret and a curse.

The book, which is deeply reported and beautifully written, wants readers with all kinds of beliefs about abortion to step back and think about one another as people ... Prager’s book presents us with a painstakingly detailed account of McCorvey’s life, her exploitation by the pro-choice and anti-abortion movements, as well as her inability and refusal to fulfill the expectations and desires of those on either side of the debate ... The queerness of Roe’s history is one of the more unexpected themes of this book ... Yet even as The Family Roe sheds new light on Roe’s history, Prager makes some serious omissions. In a work of nearly 700 pages, there is no mention of the organizing of women of color ... most of all, the book suffers from the delusion that this rift in American society over abortion can be healed by combatants’ willingness to recognize the humanity of those on the other side ... By showing McCorvey in all her unruly and unappealing complexity, Prager powerfully refutes the idea that women should have to win a morality contest in order to 'deserve' access to abortion ... The Family Roe may help us better understand those who were intimately involved with Roe v. Wade in the past, but it has little to offer in our present.

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 ... None of the people who populate this book is a perfect hero, nor are there perfect villains: Prager makes the convincing case that Mildred Jefferson, who became president of the National Right to Life Committee and whom Ronald Reagan credited with awakening him to the horrors of abortion, found her way to a career as a pro-life spokesperson in large part because of racism ... a fascinating portrait of a woman whose life was shaped by the abortion debate.

It’s a story filled with all the hallmarks of an American family drama: premarital sex, drugs, alcohol, unexpected pregnancy. But Prager’s book isn’t simply about family lies, twists, and spectacles — these are just the spice in the first complete biography of the family who accidentally made history, the individuals who have shaped the debate surrounding abortion in the United States today. To see the whole picture, simply read The Family Roe.

... trenchant ... The book excels in portraying McCorvey ... Nuanced, fine-grained, and gripping, this is a masterful study of the human lives behind a landmark case.