Sotomayor Says Overturning Roe v. Wade Would Destroy Public Perception of Supreme Court

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that if efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade are successful, then the ruling would effectively destroy public perception of the Supreme Court.

Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Sotomayor as oral arguments begin in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which challenges Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. “I don’t see how it is possible.”

Sotomayor also questioned Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart over his state’s interest in further restricting abortion.

“How is your interest anything but a religious view?” she asked, adding: “The issue of when life begins has been hotly debated by philosophers since the beginning of time. It’s still debated in religions. So when you say this is the only right that takes away from the state the ability to protect a life, that’s a religious view, isn’t it? When does the life of the women and putting her at risk, enter the calculus?” 

She even hit back at Mississippi’s arguments that Roe v. Wade should be overturned because the right to an abortion is not explicitly laid out in the text of the Constitution, saying that neither Marbury v. Madison, which established judicial review, nor rulings on birth control and same-sex marriage, are laid out in the Constitution.

“I fear none of those things are written in the Constitution,” Sotomayor said. “They have all, like Marbury v. Madison, been discerned from the nature of the Constitution.” 

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Alan Herrera

Alan is a writer, editor, and news junkie based in New York.

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