As Donald Trump addressed the nation during Tuesday’s tumultuous debate with Joe Biden, the president implied that Roe v. Wade does not face potentially being overturned should his Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, fill the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat. “It’s not on the ballot,” Trump fired back after Biden suggested that Barrett may roll back abortion rights at the federal level. Of Barrett, he added: “There’s nothing happening there. And you don’t know her view on Roe v. Wade.”
It may not shock you to learn that Barrett, a devout Catholic, appears to stringently oppose the landmark abortion case. A newspaper ad unearthed Thursday shows her signature on an open letter characterizing Roe as a “barbaric” decision. “The Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion for any reason,” read the open letter, which was published as an advertisement by St. Joseph County Right to Life, a hardline anti-abortion group based in the Indiana county that Barrett and her family reside. “It’s time to put an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade and restore laws that protect the lives of unborn children.” The statement, which Barrett signed alongside her husband, also declares that life begins as early as “fertilization,” while claiming both that most post–Roe abortions “were performed for social reasons” and that an “increasing majority” of Americans stand against continuing the use of abortion as a “method of birth control.” First reported Thursday by The Guardian, the letter was initially published in 2006, when Barrett was a professor at Notre Dame Law School.
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany quickly responded to questions about the letter with a statement vouching for the Trump-appointed circuit judge currently serving on the Seventh Court of Appeals. “The president has been clear that he would never ask a judge to prejudge a case,” she said, while also adding that “Barrett has on multiple occasions said it is never appropriate to impose that judge’s personal convictions whether they derive from faith or anywhere else in the law.”
Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has seemed to contradict the president and the White House’s depiction of Barrett as a neutral arbiter on the issue of abortion. “I think her record’s awfully clear. I think that’s one where she meets my standard of having evidence in the record, out there in public, on the record that indicates that she understands Roe was really an act of judicial imperialism and wrongly decided,” said the Missouri Republican on Tuesday. He also asserted in a July speech that he will only cast votes in favor of SCOTUS nominees with a recorded history of “explicitly [acknowledging] that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided.” Despite his strong support for Trump’s nominee, Hawley’s recent and past comments may undermine Barrett when she faces lines of Democratic questioning during her Senate confirmation hearings.
In 2013, Barrett did say that the possibility of Roe being overturned is unlikely, but she later questioned the decision’s permanence in an academic lecture she gave in 2016. “Women have a right to an abortion—I don’t think that would change,” she said. “But I think the question of whether people can get very late-term abortions, how many restrictions can be put on clinics, I think that would change.” Trump has expressed a similar view while outlining how his judicial-nomination strategy would lead to Roe being overturned. “That will happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life justices on the court,” he said during one of the 2016 presidential debates. “I will say this: It will go back to the states, and the states will then make a determination.”
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