Justice Breyer Says Court's Dobbs Decision Leaves ‘Too Many Questions’

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn abortion as a constitutional right was naive and leaves “too many questions,” former Justice Stephen Breyer reportedly said in a recent interview that characterized the court as taking a wrong turn but a restorable one.

“There are too many questions,” Breyer told The New York Times about the lingering effects of the court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which entrusted states with the right to outlaw or reduce access to the medical procedure. Breyer was among three justices who dissented on the ruling immediately before his retirement.

“Are they really going to allow women to die on the table because they won’t allow an abortion which would save her life? I mean, really, no one would do that. And they wouldn’t do that. And there’ll be dozens of questions like that,” he said while discussing the ruling and the March 26 release of his book, “Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism.”

“The Dobbs majority’s hope that legislatures and not courts will decide the abortion question will not be realized,” he’s quoted by the Times in an excerpt of his book.

The book, as the title suggests, critiques the current conservative-leaning court as being too focused on determining and enforcing the Constitution’s original meaning, no matter how archaic and contrasting the law, written in 1787, may be to modern society, according to the Times’ review.

Justice Samuel Alito, in writing for the court’s majority in the Dobbs ruling, reasoned that abortion is not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” and, therefore, it is not protected as a right.

Breyer reportedly laid out three large problems with originality in his book,