U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett defends overturning Roe v. Wade in her forthcoming book about her career on the bench, CNN reports.
Barrett’s Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution, scheduled for publication next Tuesday by Sentinel, is an account of her life as an associate justice on the court, to which she was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2020. “With the warmth and clarity that made her a popular law professor, she brings to life the making of the Constitution and explains her approach to interpreting its text,” Sentinel says.
In 2022, the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and held that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee the right for a person to have an abortion. Barrett was one of five justices to vote in favor of overturning Roe.
“The Court’s role is to respect the choices that the people have agreed upon, not to tell them what they should agree to,” Barrett writes in the book. “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. In fact, the evidence cuts in the opposite direction. Abortion not only lacked long-standing protection in American law—it had long been forbidden.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
