"The child whose conception was the genesis of the lawsuit that became Roe v. Wade is now a 51-year-old woman ready to tell her story. Shelley Lynn Thornton has come forward after decades of secrecy to publicly identify herself as the "Roe baby" in the new book "The Family Roe: An American Story" by Joshua Prager, which will be released on Sept. 14 and was excerpted in The Atlantic on Thursday. “My association with Roe started and ended because I was conceived," Thornton is quoted saying in the excerpt. Her birth mother's lawsuit became the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case that secured the right for women to legally have an abortion across the country, even though she never went through with the procedure. "In his majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun noted that a 'pregnancy will come to term before the usual appellate process is complete,'" Prager writes. Still, the Dallas waitress' challenge to the Texas law resulted in a sweeping change of the laws across the country."