States like Texas should be allowed to protect unborn babies because there is no constitutional right to abortion, Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, told Fox News.
In an interview Sunday with host Trey Gowdy, Severino discussed the lawsuits against the Texas heartbeat law that the U.S. Supreme Court heard last week.
She told Gowdy that the U.S. Constitution “doesn’t say anything about” abortion; therefore, the issue should be left up to the states.
“As Justice Scalia himself said, a lot it is not about whether I believe in abortion or not. It’s about if the Constitution talks about abortion. And in this case, the Constitution doesn’t say anything about it one way or the other, which means it’s left to the states,” Severino said.
Because of Roe v. Wade, however, states are prohibited from protecting unborn babies from abortion before viability. The 1973 ruling made the U.S. one of only seven countries in the world that allows elective abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
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Severino said the Texas case has to do with procedural issues at this point, not the law itself, which prohibits abortions once an unborn baby’s heartbeat is detectable, but the Supreme Court is slated to hear another case out of Mississippi on Dec. 1 that does directly challenge Roe v. Wade.
At issue in the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, is the question of “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortion are unconstitutional.” The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority, and pro-lifers hope the justices will use the Mississippi case to allow states to protect unborn babies’ rights for the first time in decades.
Severino said the court needs to address the “core question” of whether abortion is constitutional.
“If they don’t weigh in on that core question, we’re going to keep on having cases,” she told Fox. “Whether it’s from Texas, from Arkansas, from Kentucky, we have all these cases in line testing other aspects of it. So there’s no way for them to get away from dealing with the real underlying question which is not, ‘What do you think about abortion?’ That’s something for the legislature. It’s ‘Is abortion really in the text of the Constitution itself?’”
If abortion is not in the Constitution – and it isn’t, Severino asked why judges are the ones making the decisions about abortion rather than the American people and their elected representatives.
About a dozen states have passed heartbeat laws to protect unborn babies from abortion, but Texas is the first to be allowed to enforce its law. Whether the law will remain in effect or ultimately be upheld as constitutional in court remains uncertain. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the Biden administration’s request to block the law, but it has not ruled yet.
If the justices do overturn Roe, aborting unborn babies likely will not become illegal throughout the U.S. Instead, the power to ban or legalize the killing of unborn babies will return to the states. Currently, 11 states have laws in place to immediately ban abortions once Roe is overturned.
Since Roe, nearly 63 million unborn babies have been legally aborted in the U.S. Polls consistently show that a strong majority of Americans oppose abortions in the second and third trimesters and many support heartbeat laws that protect unborn babies at their earliest stage of life. A new poll from the University of Houston/Texas Southern University found a solid 55 percent of Texas residents support the life-saving legislation.
