Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett defends her 2022 vote to strike down Roe v. Wade in a forthcoming memoir, according to excerpts shared by CNN on Tuesday.
Barrett’s most “intense” reflections about her career revolve around the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ended half a century of federal abortion protections and led to extreme restrictions on reproductive rights in more than a dozen states.
“The evidence does not show that the American people have traditionally considered the right to obtain an abortion so fundamental to liberty that it ‘goes without saying’ in the Constitution,” Barrett writes, according to CNN. “In fact, the evidence cuts in the opposite direction. Abortion not only lacked long-standing protection in American law – it had long been forbidden.”
That’s a similar sentiment to what Justice Samuel Alito expressed in his Dobbs opinion: that “a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the nation’s history and traditions.”
He failed to mention that during America’s long period of banning abortion, the country also banned women from voting, owning property or running for office. And in his opinion, Alito repeatedly cited a jurist from the 1600s who had women executed for witchcraft.
