Amy Coney Barrett defends Supreme Court's Dobbs decision when pressed by CBS

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Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett defended the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade during an interview with CBS’ Norah O’Donnell on Sunday.

O’Donnell asked Barrett about the dissenting opinion written by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and former Justice Stephen Breyer, in which they argued courts would be faced with questions over the application of abortion regulations to medical care. The dissenting justices raised questions about the morning-after pill, IUDs as well as in vitro fertilization (IVF).

“Dobbs did not render abortion illegal. Dobbs did not say anything about whether abortion is immoral. Dobbs said that these are questions that are left to the states. And all of these kinds of questions – decisions that you mention that require medical judgments – are not ones that our Constitution connects to the courts, you know, to decide how far into pregnancy the right of abortion might extend. You know, the court was in the business of drawing a lot of those lines before, and what Dobbs says is that those calls are properly left to the democratic process. And the states have been working those out. There’s been a lot of legislative activity and a lot of state constitutional activity since the decision in Dobbs was rendered,” Barrett said.

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O’Donnell said the Dobbs decision raised questions about the future of other rights. The Dobbs decision effectively ended recognition of a constitutional right to abortion, giving individual states the power to allow, limit, or ban the practice altogether.

“So when Hillary Clinton, for example, says what’s next, she said, ‘my prediction is the court will do to gay marriage what they did to abortion,’'” O’Donnell said.

Barrett responded, “I think people who criticize the court who are outside say a lot of different things, but again the point that I make in the book is that we have to tune those things out.”

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Barrett, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in October 2020 to succeed the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is releasing a book called “Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.”

Barrett described her struggle to reconcile personal beliefs with her duty to uphold the Constitution in an excerpt from her upcoming book featured in The Free Press.

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Barrett also spoke about her confirmation hearings and her first days as a Supreme Court justice during an interview at Lincoln Center on Thursday.

Her confirmation took place behind closed doors, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and the social precautions in place at the time. It also made the lengthy confirmation process and her first days as a justice on the nation’s highest court “awkward,” she said, to laughter. “Very awkward.”