Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett defended the decision overturning Roe v. Wade in a forthcoming memoir, per a report from CNN.
“Listening to the Law,” due out on September 9, argues that the landmark 1973 ruling improperly imposed abortion rights on the nation and short-circuited political debate. Barrett called the decision that granted a nationwide right to abortion via an understanding of the Constitution’s implied right to privacy an “exercise of raw judicial power.”
“[T]he Court’s role is to respect the choices that the people have agreed upon, not to tell them what they should agree to,” Barrett wrote.
Barrett joined Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in the 2022 case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Barrett said abortion rights were never deeply rooted in American history and cited remarks from the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that Roe “prolonged divisiveness.”
“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 wrote. “In fact, the evidence cuts in the opposite direction. Abortion not only lacked long-standing protection in American law – it had long been forbidden.”
CNN reports that Barrett avoids disclosing private deliberations but describes her judicial philosophy and experiences since joining the court in 2020. She recalls that her “chambers once celebrated with champagne when other justices joined a ‘particularly tricky’ opinion of hers.” The book does not specify which case caused this reaction.
Barrett also discusses how the justices often compromise to build majorities and sometimes deliberately leave questions unresolved. She reportedly acknowledges frustration with the court’s emergency docket, which has frequently favored the Trump administration, but says the justices have little choice when such appeals are filed.
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Barrett, President Donald Trump’s third appointee to the court, filled the vacancy left by Ginsburg and cemented a conservative supermajority. Her memoir will be published by Penguin Random House’s conservative Sentinel imprint and come with a reported $2 million advance.
