articulates a compelling understanding of the nature of liberty and the role of the judiciary in American constitutional law.
First, it’s important to understand the question before the Supreme Court. It is not “Should American women possess a right to abortion?” but “Does the American Constitution protect abortion rights?” The distinction is of paramount importance. The Court’s job is not to determine which rights we should possess but rather the rights we do possess.
What Alito Got Right
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A surface reading of the Constitution would indicate an easy answer to the question. Because the Constitution doesn’t even mention abortion, how can one argue that it protects a right to an abortion? Don’t we have to locate the right in the text itself?
But the matter is not so simple, and the reason relates to the basic theory of American liberty. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex debate, the quick explanation is that many of the Founders
viewed the Constitution as reserving “all rights and powers that were not positively granted to the federal government” to the people or the states. In plain English, this means that the Constitution did not need to spell out our individual rights. They existed unless a constitutional provision declared otherwise