Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is defending her pivotal vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, arguing in a new memoir that the 1973 ruling imposed abortion rights on the nation and "came at a cost," CNN reported.
Barrett, President Donald Trump's third appointee to the high court, offers her most detailed defense yet of the decision that ended a half-century of nationwide abortion rights. In "Listening to the Law," set for release Sept. 9, Barrett says Roe v. Wade usurped the will of the people and distorted the political process.
"The Court's role is to respect the choices that the people have agreed upon, not to tell them what they should agree to," she writes in the book, which CNN obtained.
Barrett, 53, joined the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the 2022 case that overturned Roe. In her memoir, she echoes Justice Samuel Alito's description of Roe as an "exercise of raw judicial power" and contends the ruling was wrongly decided because abortion rights lacked deep roots in American history.
"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. "In fact, the evidence cuts in the opposite direction. Abortion not only lacked long-standing protection in American law – it had long been forbidden."
She cites the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who, despite supporting abortion rights, once warned that Roe may have "halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction" and "prolonged divisiveness." Conservatives, including Barrett, have frequently used those remarks to underscore arguments against Roe.
The justice acknowledges the personal toll of the Dobbs decision, recalling family vacation tensions, protests at her home and threats following the leak of a draft opinion. Still, she writes that her duty was clear: "Throughout, the job of every justice is to do his or her best by the law."
The book touches on her faith and past criticisms, including the pointed comments by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who told Barrett during a 2017 hearing that "the dogma lives loudly within you."
Barrett dismisses the idea that religious judges are uniquely challenged in applying the law, writing, "Nonreligious judges also have deeply held moral commitments, which means that they too face conflicts between those commitments and the demands of the law."
She cites her vote to reinstate the death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as an example of setting aside personal opposition to capital punishment in favor of legal duty.
"Swearing to apply the law faithfully means deciding each case based on my best judgment about what the law is," she writes. "If I decide a case based on my judgment about what the law should be, I'm cheating."
Barrett reportedly received a $2 million advance for the memoir, published by Sentinel, a conservative imprint of Penguin Random House.
Jim Thomas ✉
Jim Thomas is a writer based in Indiana. He holds a bachelor's degree in Political Science, a law degree from U.I.C. Law School, and has practiced law for more than 20 years.
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