This is a fascinating story about the woman known as “Jane Roe,” the named figure in the case that established abortion rights, but for only half a century.

The woman’s real name was Norma McCorvey. She wanted an abortion, did not get it, gave birth to a third daughter, worked for an abortion clinic, eventually was recruited by an anti-abortion group Operation Rescue and joined forces with them. Ultimately, she was used by both sides.

Although she changed sides, she never changed her belief that abortion should be legal in the first trimester.

For the latest installment of the NPR Politics Podcast Book Club, we interviewed Joshua Prager, author of The Family Roe. The book traces the history of American abortion politics through McCorvey’s life story. That story is one of both genuine conviction and opportunism, of sex and drugs and politics and class and fame and religion — all of which combine to create, as Prager puts it, a “uniquely American” tale.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Danielle Kurtzleben: While a lot of people have heard the name Jane Roe, I would imagine far fewer know the name Norma McCorvey or know much about her. How would you describe her to someone who is not well acquainted?

Joshua Prager: Norma was sort of the perfect person for me to tell the larger story of abortion in America through, because her life really was defined by a lot of the very same things that I think make abortion particularly fraught in America, particularly sex and religion and what she saw as the incompatibility or irreconcilability of those two things.

When she comes out to her church [and] her parents, that is driven home in very dramatic fashion when first of all, her mother beats her. But also, Norma goes across state lines with a friend of hers from school, a young girl. They’re about 12 years old, they check into a motel, the police are called. The girl alleges, as Norma said to me, that Norma tried inappropriate things with her, and Norma’s then sent away to a school for “delinquent children.” She bounces through these schools, and she decides she’s going to have a regular life with the white picket fence and all that. She gets married at 16 and gets pregnant right away. She later alleges that her husband beat her; that’s maybe the first of many, many lies.

She often re-imagined herself as not a sinner, but a victim. And she often was telling about these sort of horrible things she suffered, which she didn’t suffer. She begs her mother to take the child and later says her mother kidnapped the child — so it’s, again, another lie — and places that child for adoption.

Then, even though she’s gay and is having affairs with women, she’s also a prostitute at this time [and] is occasionally sleeping with men. She’s selling drugs. She gets pregnant again, places that child for adoption. Then she gets pregnant a third time, and that is the child that that becomes the Roe baby…

DK: I want to wrap up to ask you quite a big question. What do you think the story of Norma McCorvey and her daughters, especially the Roe baby, who is an adult now — what does that story illuminate about the fight over abortion today? Why is this relevant, beyond the obvious historical connections?

JP: Two things. The first is very sort of pointedly, dramatically in black and white terms. It’s often it’s a story about class. Right now we are such a divided country. We already were, but now literally, I step on this side of this of this state line, I’m allowed to have an abortion. I step on that side of the state line, I’m not to have an abortion. And often it is class that is determining who can and cannot have an abortion. And that is one very important thing that I think Norma’s story and the stories of her daughters bring to light.

The other is that, man, abortion is complicated. All four of these women [McCorvey and her three daughters] in their own ways had very nuanced and sort of ambiguous feelings about abortion. All four of them, by the way, were pro-choice and are pro-choice — the daughters, even.

Even the Roe baby, whose very existence owed to the unavailability of abortion at that time, feels that abortion ought to be legal. And so I do think our country would be better served if people recognized that and did not sort of just take the approach that “if you disagree with me, you are a horrible human being.”