Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett defended the court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization during a televised interview with CBS’ Norah O’Donnell, saying the ruling returned questions about abortion policy to the states and did not itself make abortion illegal.
Pressed about a dissent by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and former Justice Stephen Breyer that warned the decision could prompt legal uncertainty over contraception and assisted reproductive technologies, Barrett said Dobbs “did not render abortion illegal” and “did not say anything about whether abortion is immoral.” She told O’Donnell on Sept. 2 that Dobbs “said that these are questions that are left to the states.”
The dissenting opinion flagged potential downstream disputes over access to the morning-after pill, intrauterine devices and in vitro fertilization. O’Donnell asked whether the court’s decision put other rights at risk, citing public statements by critics who suggested the court might follow Dobbs by revisiting other precedents, including same-sex marriage.
Barrett responded that critics outside the court often make “a lot of different” claims and said she has urged readers to “tune those things out” in her forthcoming book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution. An excerpt of that book appeared in The Free Press, and Barrett discussed the work and her early days on the court at an event at Lincoln Center earlier this week.
Barrett, appointed by President Donald Trump in October 2020 to fill the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, described her confirmation and initial tenure on the high court as awkward because much of the process occurred under COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. She has faced public scrutiny for decisions in which the court has altered longstanding precedents.
Since the Dobbs ruling, state legislatures and courts have taken differing paths, with some states maintaining or expanding abortion access while others moved to restrict or ban most abortions. Barrett told O’Donnell that many of those policy choices have been and continue to be handled through state legislative and constitutional processes.
Legal scholars and advocates on both sides of the abortion debate have repeatedly argued over how broadly the Dobbs decision should be read. The Dobbs majority held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, returning the issue to state-level policymakers. The dissenting justices cautioned that the reasoning could invite litigation on matters involving reproductive health beyond abortion.
Barrett’s interview comes as the court and its justices have remained in the public eye amid a string of high-profile rulings. She said in the excerpted book material that reconciling personal beliefs with judicial duty has been a central part of her work on the bench. She emphasized the judiciary’s role as defined by constitutional text and precedent rather than by individual justices’ policy views.
The interview was conducted by a senior CBS correspondent in Washington, D.C., and follows other recent public appearances by Barrett, including a discussion of her confirmation hearings. Her answers to questions about Dobbs underscore the continuing legal and political debate over the decision’s implications and the boundaries of constitutional rights in areas of reproductive and medical care.