(LifeSiteNews) – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett defended the court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in her upcoming book, arguing the decision was driven by the law and not belief.
The Washington Post reported that Tuesday will see the release of Barrett’s first book, Listening to the Law, which reportedly will explore “how the court operates, its history, and what she thinks about the law and the Constitution.”
“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, whom President Donald Trump nominated in his first term to replace the late left-wing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wrote in the book, according to the Post. “In fact, the evidence cuts in the opposite direction. Abortion not only lacked long-standing protection in American law — it has long been forbidden.”
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in 2022’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, and 5-4 to overturn Roe, which for nearly half a century had forced all 50 states to allow most abortions. Barrett sided with the majority on both questions.
The ruling, which threw the abortion industry and its lobby into disarray by allowing the practice to be directly banned, greatly angered left-wing activists (some to the point of threatening her life), who accused Barrett of ruling based on her Catholic faith, a charge the justice rejects in the book.
“My office doesn’t entitle me to align the legal system with my moral or policy views,” she wrote. “Swearing to apply the law faithfully means deciding each case based on what the law is. If I decide a case based on my judgement about what the law should be, I’m cheating.”
While delivering pro-lifers a major victory with Roe, Barrett has been much more of a mixed bag from conservative and originalist perspectives, often siding with dismissive rulings on COVID-19 shot mandates, religious freedom, and LGBT ideology, and last year addressing a biologically female “transgender” lawyer as “mister” during oral arguments.
While promoting the book for an interview with CBS News, Barrett further indicated she is not a fully-reliable conservative vote in response to a question about former Democrat leader Hillary Clinton predicting the Dobbs ruling would be followed by overturning same-sex “marriage.” Barrett answered that she does consider engaging in marriage, sexual intimacy, and birth control fundamental rights.
Since Roe’s fall, 12 states have banned all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby continues to work feverishly to cancel out those deterrents via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions.
Ballot initiatives have been one of the abortion lobby’s most potent tactics. Up until 2024, it had consistent success since Dobbs using false claims that pro-life laws are dangerous to stoke fear about the issue among the general public.
After 2020, pro-lifers either failed to enact pro-life amendments or stop pro-abortion ones in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Vermont, Kansas, and Ohio, prompting much conversation among pro-lifers about the need to develop new strategies to protect life at the ballot box as well as consternation within the Republican Party over the political ramifications of continuing to take a clear pro-life position.
Ten states had such amendments on the ballot in November 2024. Pro-lifers defeated pro-abortion ballot initiatives in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota, breaking the abortion lobby’s two-year winning streak, but amendments to embed abortion “rights” in state constitutions prevailed in the remaining states.
