Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is preparing to release her first memoir, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution, which is scheduled for publication on September 9.
In the book, Barrett offers a vigorous defense of her 2022 vote in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the landmark case that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended nearly five decades of federally protected abortion rights. Barrett argues that the 1973 Roe decision was an overreach of judicial authority, calling it an “exercise of raw judicial power” that lacked grounding in American legal tradition.
According to excerpts published by CNN, she insists that the Constitution does not support a right to abortion and that, historically, abortion was long forbidden rather than protected. “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,” she writes, according to the excerpt. “In fact, the evidence cuts in the opposite direction. Abortion not only lacked long-standing protection in American law – it had long been forbidden.”
