The heads of 40 pro-life organizations have signed a joint letter blasting Ketanji Brown Jackson’s radical abortion record.
During her Senate confirmation hearings yesterday, Jackson falsely claimed there is a “right” to abortion in the Constitution even though no such right exists. Jackson says Roe v. Wade is “settled law” and that women have a “right” to kill babies in abortions and she called killing babies in abortions merely a “termination of pregnancy.”
Jackson’s record on abortion suggests she would vote to uphold Roe and she is endorsed by radical pro-abortion groups.
Pro-life advocates have reasons to be worried about Jackson’s abortion leanings. Her record includes working with abortion activists on a case about suppressing pro-life advocates’ free speech in Massachusetts.
She also ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to defund the billion-dollar abortion chain Planned Parenthood, and she clerked for pro-abortion Justice Breyer when he issued an opinion against the partial-birth abortion ban.
The coalition of nearly 40 pro-life leaders, including LifeNews.com editor Steven Ertelt, sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, outlining their concerns with Jackson’s record.
“She has been handpicked by a pro-abortion president to satisfy the pressure campaign from pro-abortion, progressive activists,” the pro-life leaders wrote. “These activists refuse to acknowledge the toll that Roe v. Wade has inflicted on our country. More than 62 million lives have been lost to abortion since the 1973 Roe decision.”
The full text of the letter follows:
As the Senate engages in its important role in the Supreme Court nomination process, we write as a coalition of national and state pro-life leaders to raise grave concerns regarding Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination.
President Joe Biden has committed to only appoint justices who support the Roe v. Wade jurisprudence.1 Scholars from across the spectrum of legal thought have criticized Roe as “bad constitutional law”2 and “among the most damaging of judicial decisions.”3 Roe not only denigrates our legal system, but also authorizes our nation’s radical policy of abortion on demand until birth.
One of the destructive outcomes of the Roe decision was removing policymaking decisions from elected representatives. Judicial activism promotes and extends this blatant overstepping of separation of powers. Especially now, as the Supreme Court considers a case that questions Roe’s core holding, confirming a justice to the Supreme Court with a commitment to judicial activism would be a step in the wrong direction.
Jackson’s past writings strongly indicate that she may be unable to fairly consider arguments from those politically divergent from her own. In an amicus brief co-authored by Jackson on behalf of the Massachusetts National Abortion Rights Action League (Mass. NARAL) and other abortion groups regarding buffer zones around abortion clinics in Massachusetts, she portrayed pro-life sidewalk counselors as a “hostile, noisy crowd of ‘in-your-face’ protesters.”4 However, offering life-affirming support or prayer outside of a clinic is not “harassment”5 and to insist that offering an alternative to abortion is “indisputably harmful to a medical patient’s physical well-being”6 is the height of absurdity.
Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record speaks loudly of the type of justice she would be on the Supreme Court. She has been handpicked by a pro-abortion president to satisfy the pressure campaign from pro-abortion, progressive activists. These activists refuse to acknowledge the toll that Roe v. Wade has inflicted on our country. More than 62 million lives have been lost to abortion since the 1973 Roe decision. As science has advanced, our policymakers have been held back from enacting laws to protect the unborn.
As the Judiciary Committee considers Jackson’s nomination, we ask that you thoroughly examine her concerning pattern of judicial activism, hostility to the pro-life community, and connections to the deep-pocketed pro-abortion industry.
During questioning, Senator Diane Feinstein asked her about abortion. Jackson said Roe and Casey are “settled law of the Supreme Court concerning the right to terminate a pregnancy. They established a framework the court has reaffirmed.”
“I do agree with Justice Barrett and Justice Kavanaugh on this issue, Jackson said when Feinstein queried her about comments the two Supreme Court justices made about how Roe v. Wade is current SCOTUS precedent. Both justices eventually indicated in their own hearings that precedent can be overturned but Feinstein did not ask this.
Feinstein pushed further to try to get Jackson to agree that Roe is some sort of “super precedent” that can never be overturned and Jackson would not go quite that far in endorsing the concept. Jackson says Roe v. Wade has a stronger “reliance” precedent because it has been reaffirmed but her answer makes it clear that precedent can be overturned when SCOTUS finds a case was wrongly decided. And no case was more wrongly decided than Roe.
The irony in the questioning is that Jackson may never have a chance to apply the precedent as the Supreme Court is currently looking at possibly overturning Roe v. Wade.
The biggest case the Supreme Court is expected to hand down soon, which it has already heard, is the Dobbs case involving a 15-week abortion ban in Mississippi that could either give states more latitude to protect babies from abortions or will overturn Roe entirely, allowing wholesale abortions bans protecting hundreds of thousands of babies annually.
During the high court’s consideration of Dobbs, Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart told the justices on the nation’s highest court that it’s time to overturn Roe v. Wade so states that provide legal protections for unborn children.
“Roe versus Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey haunt our country,” Stewart told the Supreme Court as it opened hearings on the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
“They have no basis in the Constitution. They have no home in our history or traditions. They’ve damaged the democratic process. They’ve poisoned the law. They’ve choked off compromise. For fifty years they’ve kept this Court at the center of a political battle that it can never resolve. And fifty years on, they stand alone: nowhere else does this Court recognize a right to end a human life,” he said.
For decades, under Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, states have been prohibited from banning abortions before viability. As a result, about 63 million unborn babies and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mothers have died in supposedly “safe,” legal abortions. Now the Supreme Court has agreed to re-consider this precedent and decide “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortion are unconstitutional.”
