I Am Roe

Norma McCorvey was a pregnant unwed mother of two when she took her fight for a legal abortion to the Supreme Court. Norma wasn't anyone's idea of a role model in 1973, a gritty, working-poor woman from Louisiana who couldn't face the psychological pain of carrying an unplanned pregnancy to term, only to give up the child for adoption. She initially sought a back-alley abortion but, terrified by what she found, she fled. Shortly afterward, she was introduced to a team of public-spirited attorneys and gained a new identity: Jane Roe, the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, the court case that guaranteed freedom of choice for all American women. . Ironically, the Supreme Court decision came too late to help Norma. Frightened and alone, she eventually gave birth to the child she never wanted to have and surrendered the infant for adoption. After giving birth, she suffered a profound depression - compounded by her abandonment by the Roe lawyers: Norma learned of the high court decision one day while reading a newspaper. After a suicide attempt, she spent many years as a recluse, drifting from city to city and job to job. In 1989, shortly after revealing her identity to a reporter, Norma's house was the target of a drive-by shooting. To her credit, instead of hiding, she chose to speak out, with the 1989 March on Washington beginning her emergence as a public figure. Norma McCorvey's story is that of a woman both ordinary and extraordinary, whose private anguish blossomed into a public triumph for all American women in the battle for reproductive freedom.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.