Justice Clarence Thomas: Roe v. Wade Was “Grievously Wrong” and “Should Be Overruled”

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Jul 1, 2020   |   12:17PM   |   Washington, DC

Monday’s Supreme Court decision overturning a pro-life Louisiana law that saved babies from abortions and protected women’s health has frustrated the majority of Americans who are pro-life. But the dissent Justice Clarence Thomas issued reminds pro-life Americans why they respect his jurisprudence so much.

LifeNews has already covered Thomas’ dissent in part but it’s worth taking a more full look at his comments because he hits the nail on the head when it comes to understanding that there is no right to abortion in the Constitution and that Roe v. Wade and its progeny should be overturned.

“Today a majority of the Court perpetuates its ill-founded abortion jurisprudence by enjoining a perfectly legitimate state law and doing so without jurisdiction,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote.

“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 in his masterful dissent.

Justice Thomas added that the so-called “right to abortion” was “created out of whole cloth, without a shred of support from the Constitution’s text” and he argued that Roe et al. “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,” Thomas wrote. “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.”

“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 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 wrote.

Thomas takes the abortion businesses to task, saying they have no standing to represent women.

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“As is often the case with legal challenges to abortion regulations, this suit was brought by abortionists and abortion clinics. Their sole claim before this Court is that Louisiana’s law violates the purported substantive due process right of a woman to abort her unborn child. But they concede that this right does not belong to them, and they seek to vindicate no private rights of their own. Under a proper understanding of Article III, these plaintiffs lack standing to invoke our jurisdiction,” he said.

“But today’s decision is wrong for a far simpler reason: The Constitution does not constrain the States’ ability to regulate or even prohibit abortion. This Court created the right to abortion based on an amorphous, unwritten right to privacy, which it grounded in the “legal fiction” of substantive due process,” Thomas added.

He added: “As the origins of this jurisprudence readily demonstrate, the putative right to abortion is a creation that should be undone. This reasoning is as mystifying as it is baseless.”

You can read his entire dissent starting on page 62.