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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas believes the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion was incorrectly decided.
“Roe is grievously wrong for many reasons, but the most fundamental is that its core holding – that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to abort her unborn child – finds no support in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Thomas wrote.
The idea that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment understood the Due Process Clause to protect a right to abortion is farcical.
The “right to abortion,” he wrote, was “created out of whole cloth, without a shred of support from the Constitution’s text.” Roe and its subsequent cases, he argued, “should be overruled. The idea that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment understood the Due Process Clause to protect a right to abortion is farcical. In 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, a majority of the States and numerous Territories had laws on the books that limited (and in many cases nearly prohibited) abortion.
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“It would no doubt shock the public at that time to learn that one of the new constitutional Amendments contained hidden within the interstices of its text is a right to abortion. The fact that it took this Court over a century to find that right all but proves that it was more than hidden – it simply was not (and is not) there.”
Thomas, who started his career in the Missouri attorney general’s office, also disagreed with the court’s recent decision to strike down a Louisiana pro-life law “Today a majority of the Court perpetuates its ill-founded abortion jurisprudence by enjoining a perfectly legitimate state law and doing so without jurisdiction,” he wrote.
The court, in a 5-4 ruling, overturned a Louisiana law that required abortion doctors to acquire admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic. The goal of the law, supporters said, was to protect the health of a woman if the procedure didn’t go as planned.
–Dwight Widaman | Metro Voice
