Amy Coney Barrett has finally explained why she voted to end the constitutional right to an abortion in a new book that reportedly earned the conservative Supreme Court justice a $2 million advance.
Since President Donald Trump took office, Coney Barrett has emerged as one of the court’s most closely watched justices, as she has occasionally broken with her fellow conservatives to side with the court’s liberal justices.
The former Notre Dame law professor and federal appellate judge also recused herself from a high-profile case involving a Catholic charter school, which ultimately led to a conservative defeat, and ripped into Trump’s solicitor general for disrespecting her liberal colleague Justice Elena Kagan.
Those “betrayals” have at times earned Coney Barrett the ire of the same MAGA loyalists who previously hailed her 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The ruling overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that established the constitutional right to an abortion.
In a new book called Listening to the Law, the 53-year-old justice wrote that Roe had been an “exercise of raw judicial power,” CNN reported.
She also argues in the book, which is set to be released on September 9, that the American people have not traditionally considered abortion a “fundamental” liberty and said the Roe court was “getting ahead of the American people” on the issue.
During her confirmation hearing, Coney Barrett—who was appointed by Trump in 2020 to fill the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat—had refused to say whether she thought Roe was correctly decided.
Although abortion isn’t explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, an earlier Supreme Court ruling had found that the Constitution’s Due Process Clause and Fourteenth Amendment implicitly create a fundamental “right to privacy.”
In Roe, the court found that this right to privacy also included the right to an abortion during the first trimester.
But in Listening to the Law, Coney Barrett writes: “Abortion not only lacked long-standing protection in American law — it had long been forbidden.”
The majority decision in Roe had reached a different conclusion, with the justices finding that restrictive criminal abortion laws are “of relatively recent vintage.”
In English common law, which the U.S. system is based on, abortions could be performed before “quickening,” or before the fetus’ movements can be felt at around 16 to 18 weeks of pregnancy.
Coney Barrett nevertheless writes that the “complicated moral debate” surrounding abortion makes it different from other privacy-related rights that enjoy broad public support, including “the rights to marry, have sex, procreate, use contraception,” according to CNN.
More than 60 percent of Americans opposed the Dobbs decision when it came out, the Pew Research Center found at the time.
Coney Barrett signed onto the majority opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia but didn’t author her own concurrence, meaning her book is the first time she has explained her reasoning in the case.
Trump had appointed Barrett with the explicit goal of overturning Roe, but in a key internal vote, she opposed taking up Dobbs, The New York Times revealed in June.
The other four conservative justices voted to hear the case anyway, betting correctly that if forced to decide, Barrett would vote to eliminate federal abortion rights.
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