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Chief Justice John Roberts said the Supreme Court should not have overturned Roe v. Wade.
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He argued that the court’s conservative judges went too far in ending a federal right to abortion.
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He added that a “scarier decision” would have been “significantly less troubling”.
Chief Justice John Roberts made it abundantly clear that he felt the five other conservative Supreme Court justices went too far in their decision on Friday to Roe v. Wade. to overthrow and end a federal right to abortion.
“The Court’s decision to dismiss Roe and… Casey is a serious shock to the justice system – no matter how you look at those cases,” wrote Roberts in his unanimous opinion, released Friday along with the majority opinion. There is nothing more needed to decide this case.”
However, Roberts’s opinion was largely contested in the face of the bloc of other Republican-appointed judges, including President Donald Trump’s three picks, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Comey Barrett.
Judge Samuel Alito wrote the court’s majority opinion, which overturned nearly 50 years of precedent that abortion rights are part of a constitutional right to privacy. as he had in a leaked design adviceAlito set fire to the historic 1973 decision in Roe.
“Roe was hugely wrong from the start,” Alito wrote. “The reasoning was exceptionally weak and the decision has had damaging consequences. Far from achieving a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have fueled debate and deepened divisions.”
Roberts has long built a reputation as a judge who prefers the court to deal more directly with the questions before him rather than write sweeping opinions that will go down in the history books. It has long been thought that this principle inspired his decision to preserve the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, better known as Obamacare, in the 2012 ruling that protected President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement.
Roberts, in his unanimous opinion, made it clear that he would have upheld Mississippi’s near-complete ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy — the law decided at the center of the case on Friday — but stressed that Roe’s reversal and the 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey would have profound ramifications. Roberts called such action a “dramatic step” that Mississippi did not want the court to take. (The state changed its view on the case after Barrett was confirmed in court.)
“Both the Court’s opinion and the disagreement show a relentless freedom of doubt on the legal issue that I cannot share,” Roberts wrote. “For example, I’m not sure whether a ban on terminating a pregnancy from the moment of conception should be treated the same in the Constitution as a ban after 15 weeks.”
Roberts’ preferential decision would still have severely curtailed abortion rights. Upholding Mississippi Law Without Roe. to overthrow would have limited the concept of fetal viability that the court has made the center of its ruling in Casey. Roberts said he agreed that the court made a mistake in its original decision in Roe, but added that the judges should not have “undermined the decision to the bone”.
Read the original article Business Insider