Amy Coney Barrett, the conservative supreme court justice whose controversial fast-track confirmation at the end of Donald Trump’s first presidency led directly to the panel’s vote to strike down abortion rights nationally, has expressed in a new memoir her belief that the ruling “respected the choice” of the American people.
Barrett was paid a $2m advance for her book Listening to the Law, according to CNN, which obtained a copy and published brief extracts on Tuesday, a week before its 9 September publication.
Her comments about the June 2022 decision that reversed the court’s 1973 Roe v Wade ruling guaranteeing the constitutional right to an abortion are certain to draw scrutiny – and criticism.
“[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 writes, according to CNN. The outlet framed Barrett’s comment as reflecting her belief that her predecessors’ 7-2 vote in Roe v Wade had “usurped the will of the American people”.
In a May 2024 poll, however, more than 60% of Americans believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That percentage stood only four points lower in 2021, one year before Barrett joined the court’s four other ultraconservatives in removing national protections and leaving states to set their own abortion laws.
Numerous states moved quickly to ban or severely restrict access to abortions, with legal proceedings still playing out in a number of others. According to the New York Times, 19 states have laws that either outlaw the procedure completely, or limit it to earlier in a pregnancy than the “fetal viability” standard of Roe v Wade.
Barrett’s book, CNN said, also takes on religious bias and details her decision-making process. But she states at the outset that she would not reveal details of court deliberations about specific cases – or identify her seven children or other family members by name “for the sake of their privacy”.
Barrett’s nomination and confirmation were rammed through the US Senate by the Republican majority leader, Mitch McConnell, within weeks of the September death of the veteran liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
It gave Trump his third supreme court pick and cemented an unassailable 6-3 conservative majority that has repeatedly ruled in his favor during his second presidency, which began in January, including landmark decisions expanding presidential power.
Barrett’s confirmation, just eight days before the November 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden, stood in stark contrast to McConnell’s handling of the aftermath of the death of another conservative justice, Antonin Scalia, in February 2016. Then, McConnell celebrated his successful stalling of Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, for almost a year, until Trump took office and replaced Scalia with Neil Gorsuch in April 2017.
CNN said Barrett refers to Trump “only in passing” and states, dispassionately, that the court has always been entangled with its times.
“While the intensity of the challenges faced by the Court ebbs and flows, the challenges themselves will never disappear,” Barrett is quoted as saying.
“Throughout, the job of every justice is to do his or her best by the law.”
Yet the book provides glimpses of life inside the court as the new Trump-shaped panel began to work together. After one “particularly tricky” opinion Barrett wrote, and other justices supported, staff in her chambers celebrated with champagne.
Barrett was also dismissive of the three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer, who joined the chief justice, John Roberts, in opposing the majority abortion decision.
Their dissent cited Ginsburg and declared that the 49 years of Roe v Wade being in effect “protected the liberty and equality of women” and guaranteed “government could not control a woman’s body or the course of a woman’s life”.
But Barrett, in her book, claims that the “complicated moral debate” about abortion distinguishes it from other rights more traditionally recognized as fundamental that enjoy broad public support, including “the rights to marry, have sex, procreate, use contraception”, CNN reported.
