Supporters of Roe v. Wade are spreading fears that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft decision overturning the landmark abortion case would mean that other Court precedents, including interracial marriage, could also be canceled.
Many commentators focused on a paragraph in the opening summary of the decision, which was published by Politico:
However, they appear not to have read the entire opinion. As Breitbart News noted in a fact check, Justice Alito specifically distinguished abortion from all other cases — including Loving v. Virginia (1967), which struck down Jim Crow laws against interracial marriage — since of these issues, only abortion involves the potential taking of what might be a human life:
What sharply distinguishes the abortion right from the rights recognized in the cases on which Roe and Casey rely is something that both these decisions acknowledged: Abortion destroys what those decisions call “potential life” and what the law at issue in this case regards as the life of an “unborn human being.” See Roe, 410 U.S., at 159 (abortion is “inherently different”); Casey, 505 U.S., at 852 (abortion is a “unique act”). None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion. They are therefore inapposite. They do not support the right to obtain an abortion, and by the same token, our conclusion that the Constitution does not confer such a right does not undermine them in any way.
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And to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to case doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion
One of the conservative justices who apparently joined Alito’s opinion is Clarence Thomas, who is in an interracial marriage.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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