Justice Samuel Alito said the Constitution never granted a right to abortion and defended his Dobbs opinion as a straightforward originalist reading, even as he warned of intimidation aimed at the Court.
Justice Samuel Alito said the Constitution never granted a right to abortion and defended his Dobbs opinion as a straightforward originalist reading, even as he warned of intimidation aimed at the Court.
Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito went on Fox News Sunday and stood firmly behind the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.
In a prerecorded interview ahead of the Court’s new term, the author of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization said the 14th Amendment never created a constitutional right to abortion. He framed the 2022 ruling as a clear application of originalism and returned the issue to Congress and the states.
Alito, widely regarded as one of the Court’s most conservative members next to Clarence Thomas, used the appearance to promote his new book, “So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country.” He also addressed the draft leak, the threats that followed, and what he called a broader push to pressure justices.
Alito did not soft-pedal the core holding.
He tied the result directly to the text and the year the amendment was adopted.
"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."
He added historical context that, in his view, settled the question.
"In 1868, abortion was illegal in most of the states."
And he pressed the logic further.
"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 said. The opinion he wrote tore into the privacy precedents that began with Roe, noted that the Constitution’s text never mentioned abortion or a free-standing right to privacy, and sent the issue back to elected lawmakers.
That is the point critics still refuse to accept: the Court did not invent a national abortion code. It removed one the justices had imposed for nearly 50 years and told voters and their representatives to decide.
Alito described the May 2022 leak of the draft Dobbs opinion to Politico as a first in the country’s history and a direct attack on the institution.
"That was totally unprecedented in the history of the country."
He called it a “grave breach of the trust that everybody who worked in this building had before that point.” The consequences, he said, were predictable and dangerous.
"And it very predictably made the five of us in the majority targets for assassination and nearly resulted in the assassination of my colleague Brett Kavanaugh."
In June 2022, California man Nicholas Roske showed up at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home armed in an apparent assassination plot that was foiled. Justice Amy Coney Barrett later recounted having to explain to her children why she was wearing a bulletproof vest after the leak. Death threats hit the justices who joined the majority.
Alito said he has a theory about who leaked the draft but that the “evidence available at this time is not strong enough” to identify that person. He went further on the climate around the Court.
"I do think there is a concerted effort to intimidate the court and justices on the court, try to influence us to decide cases differently from the way in which we have been deciding them."
Lawful disagreement is one thing. Turning justices into targets so they will abandon the Constitution is another.
Alito also used the interview to revisit pandemic lockdowns, calling them “a stress test of our constitutional rights.”
He said the episode showed many people were ready to downgrade freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion. He pointed to the double standard of Las Vegas casinos allowing people in without masks while houses of worship faced severe limits on attendance.
When officials treat worship as disposable and casinos as essential, the hierarchy of values is not hard to read. Alito’s larger point was that constitutional rights do not pause because politicians declare an emergency.
Alito has called himself a “practical originalist” and more recently a “working judicial originalist.” Dobbs is the clearest recent example of that method: read the words, read the history, and refuse to invent rights the ratifiers never enacted.
The 2022 decision did not ban abortion nationwide. It ended the Court’s role as a national abortion board and put the question back where the Constitution left it, with Congress and the states. That outcome still enrages activists who preferred a single judicial rule to democratic debate.
Alito’s interview, timed to the start of a new term and to his book launch, restated the same basic claim. The liberty clause of 1868 did not silently enact Roe. Pretending otherwise required the Court to act as a legislature. Dobbs stopped that.
The leak, the threats, and the foiled plot against Kavanaugh showed how far some were willing to go when the Court refused to keep rewriting the Constitution. Alito’s answer was not to retreat. It was to say the text was clear all along.
When justices follow the Constitution instead of the mob, the country gets self-government back, and the people who preferred judicial rule lose their shortcut.
