Justice Alito says it was perfectly clear Constitution didnt grant right to abortion

WASHINGTON — Republican-appointed Justice Samuel Alito heartily defended the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v.Wade, which guaranteed a national right to abortion, and lamented the death threats that ensued at the time.

Alito, who authored the 2022 landmark Dobbs v.Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, hailed it as a textbook case of interpreting the Constitution as it is written rather than projecting one’s personal beliefs on the law.

“I know this is very controversial, but I thought it was perfectly clear that the reference to liberty in the 14th Amendment adopted in 1868 did not mean that there is a constitutional right to abortion,” Alito told “Fox News Sunday” in a prerecorded interview.“In 1868, abortion was illegal in most of the states,” he added.

“And so it is unthinkable that those states would ratify an amendment that rendered their own laws unconstitutional and then continue to have those laws on the books for decades after that.”“I think there, originalism provided a clear answer.”Alito, who is widely regarded as the most conservative Supreme Court justice next to Clarence Thomas, is a disciple of originalism, the legal philosophy of interpreting the Constitution and laws by the text and how its meaning would’ve been understood at the time it was written.He has frequently characterized himself as a “practical originalist,” though more recently he’s opted to describe himself as a “working judicial originalist” who is wary of academic originalism becoming too pure.The associate justice did a brief media tour ahead of the Supreme Court’s start of the new term on Monday to promote his new book, “So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country.”In the Dobbs decision, Alito tore into legal precedents that began with Roe v.

Wade, finding that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed a fundamental right to privacy, which meant that women had the right to obtain ab...