Amy Coney Barrett Defends Striking Down Roe v. Wade In New Book

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.

In a summary of beliefs Barrett expressed in her book, CNN reports the judge said Roe “usurped the will of the American people.” Barrett wrote that the 1973 decision was “getting ahead” of Americans. “(T)he Court’s role is to respect the choices that the people have agreed upon, not to tell them what they should agree to,” she also said, according to CNN.

However, polling shows that 63% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and just 36% say it should be illegal in all or most cases. Those figures have been consistent for the past several years, pollsters say.

Barrett also writes in her book that she was on a family vacation after the Dobbs decision went public. Her brother-in-law showed up on the trip with a copy of it, telling her he was going to be reading it. Barrett wrote that she gave him a hug even though “Dobbs did not top the list of things I wanted to talk about on vacation.”

According to CNN, Barrett’s book only makes passing mention of President Donald Trump, who nominated her to the court in 2020 after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of abortion rights.

Barrett’s memoir, “Listening to the Law,” is set to be published on Sept. 9.