The Family Roe: An American Story by Joshua Prager

Author:Joshua Prager [Prager, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, United States, 20th Century, law, Gender & the Law, political science, Women in Politics, Social Science, Abortion & Birth Control
ISBN: 9780393247725
Google: EBg1EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-09-14T00:21:19.001523+00:00

THIRTY YEARS BEFORE, days after Roe became law, Mary Coffee had proudly connected her daughter with the official news service of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Baptist Press had blessed the lawyer’s work.

But there was no longer any room for Coffee in her church. Sixteen million strong, the SBC had come to repudiate not only abortion but homosexuality and gender equality. The church now asserted that “a wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.” Same-sex attraction was “pathological, abnormal, and mostly if not entirely a matter of external influence, learned behavior, acquired taste, and personal choice.” Regarding abortion, the SBC now put the interests of the zygote—“a human being, created in God’s image”—ahead of the mother.

It was a source of some pain to Hartt that her partner did not believe in God. “I have always considered her a virtuous pagan,” says Hartt. Still, Coffee had believed in her church. Rejected by it, she had been left to lean on other supports: her family, the law. But her parents were now dead, and her career was dying. In the spring of 2005, after taking on a new client, a couple in Dallas at odds with a car dealer over the return of a leased Toyota, Coffee lost her license for the last time.

Thirty-five years before, Coffee had stood in a Dallas courthouse and spoken of a lawsuit that concerned nothing less, she said, than “fundamental human freedom.” Roe had gone on to safeguard that freedom for millions of women. Not one of those millions had come to her aid through her years of struggle. Money was a source of growing stress for her and Hartt. More and more, they fought.

Coffee felt that Hartt drank too much. Hartt could also be bossy; the secretary Peggy Clewis recalled a dinner with the couple at their inherited home when Hartt “harassed Linda a lot.” Coffee shrank from conflict and described herself as “slow to anger.” But physical exercise now relieved little more than her insomnia. And Coffee came to see that she could no longer afford to lawyer; “economics,” she says. She came unmoored. In April 2006, the police arrived at her home on Wabash Circle Drive to find that she had “assaulted” Hartt. She would soon assault her partner twice more, punching Hartt in the mouth and hitting her with a purse, its brass buckle cutting the back of her head.

Hartt was bleeding onto her shirt when she crossed the street that July afternoon to seek help from a neighbor. “She was kind of introducing herself and said, very apologetically, ‘I’m a lesbian,’ ” recalls Mary Carter. Hartt told Carter that her partner had struck her and they called the police, who arrested Coffee and noted that the precipitating argument had involved money. Hartt and Coffee, they wrote, had “no food, no electricity, and no phone.” Coffee’s sister, whom she rarely saw, posted her $500 bail.

Years before, as Hartt had stood by Coffee through her trial for fraud, her mother had likened her love for Coffee to the love of Jesus for mankind.

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