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Amy Coney Barrett Says She Doesn't Know How She'd Rule On An Abortion Case, But I Do And You Do Too

And so does Donald Trump.

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(Photo by Tom Williams-Pool/Getty Images)

For everyone who knows Merrick Garland’s seat on the Supreme Court was stolen from him (along with the 100+ lower federal judiciary seats that Senate obstructionism left empty), and who respects Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s final wish that the next president fill her vacancy on the Court, the Amy Coney Barrett hearings were always going to suck. And that was before her nomination fete became a COVID hotspot, and infected senators are at the hearings without a mask on risking the lives of everyone around them to rush through her confirmation days before the election. So, yeah, there’s a lot to be angry about. But there’s more. Of course, there’s more.

Yesterday was the first day of the Coney Barrett confirmation hearing. Dems hammered home health care, which is not quite what the GOP seemed to expect, seeing as they spent most of their time talking about religious freedom. But still, it went as most observers expected.

In today’s hearings, the abortion trip wire went off, and Coney Barrett basically refused to answer Senator Diane Feinstein’s questions about Roe v. Wade. She evaded, claimed not to have an “agenda,” and said, “I can’t express views on cases or pre-commit.” Check out the video for yourself.

But we all know how Covid Barrett will rule on reproductive freedom issues. Donald Trump campaigned on the promised he’d pick Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe “automatically.” And Coney Barrett’s record shows that, in this case, Trump is keeping that promise. She’s ruled against reproductive rights the two times the issue was before her on the Seventh Circuit, and her writings before her time on the federal bench reveal an extreme viewpoint on abortion rights, as detailed by Nancy Northup, President and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights:

From 2010-2016, she was a member in the Notre Dame Chapter of University Faculty for Life. In 2006, she was a signatory on a newspaper advertisement sponsored by St. Joseph County Right to Life. The ad called for an end to Roe v. Wade and Barrett specifically signed onto a statement that she opposes “abortion on demand” and defends “the right to life from fertilization,” an extreme legal position that has implications for contraception, abortion care and fertility treatments. In 2012 she signed onto an advocacy letter that called contraception and sterilization “gravely immoral and unjust” and wrongly characterized emergency contraception as “an abortion-inducing” drug. She subscribes to the judicial philosophy of originalism that rejects constitutional protections for abortion rights. Her writings are clear that she does not view Roe as a “super precedent” and the principle of stare decisis would not be a restraint to overturning Roe. In the two abortion rights cases that have come before her as a federal appellate judge, Judge Barrett joined opinions that suggest upending Supreme Court law on both the substantive right to abortion and the procedural safeguards that allow the right to be vindicated in court.

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This is why, for only the second time in the Center for Reproductive Rights’ history, they are opposing someone’s elevation to the Supreme Court. In fact, they say Coney Barrett has the “most extreme anti-reproductive rights record since Judge Robert Bork.”

Anyone who values the right to choose what is best for their own bodies, or maybe has benefited from experimental medical treatments that were developed using stem cells from an aborted fetus (ahem, Donald Trump), should be terrified. So whatever equivocations are trotted out during the confirmation process, Coney Barrett’s record speaks for itself, and it has an awful lot to say.

headshotKathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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