Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens and I'm Jan Black.

Roe v. Wade is the landmark case in which the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that access to safe and legal abortion

is a constitutional right. That 1973 ruling is perhaps the best known case that the court has

ever decided. Our guest on this episode, investigative journalist Joshua Prager,

has spent 11 years researching and writing about the case and the key figures in it.

The result of that work is Breger's new book, The Family Row, an American story.

Joshua, we thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

The obvious question, spending 11 years researching and writing about this topic,

why did you decide to tackle something so big?

And how did you go about researching it? You know, I didn't realize how big a project this was going to be.

What got me into it was in 2010, I was reading an article in The New Yorker about gay marriage, and it mentioned

parenthetically that sometimes a plaintiff is good for a cause, and sometimes she isn't.

And in the latter category, they mentioned Norma McCorvey because she had sort of, she was Jane

Roe, and she had famously switched sides on the issue from becoming, from being pro-choice

to becoming pro-life. And then it mentioned in passing that the case had taken too long for her

to have the abortion and that she had fought to have and she had secured the legal right to have.

I had incorrectly assumed that whoever Jane Roe was,

she had an abortion. And so I said, wow, I'm assuming that the child that she gave birth to,

I didn't know if it was a boy or a girl, but that person was then 40 years old. And I assume that

he or she, it turned out, I correctly assumed that he or she would have found out who they were, who they'd been born to, I should say.

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