Gretchen Borchelt, Senior Counsel & Director of State Reproductive Health Policy

by Gretchen Borchelt, Senior Counsel
National Women’s Law Center

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal about potential Supreme Court nominee Judge Diane Wood makes the following claim: "Recent Supreme Court nominees have come before the Senate with such slim records on abortion that their views were anybody’s guess."

Say what?

Let’s review the evidence on two of our three most recent nominees:

Chief Justice Roberts questioned the very existence of the constitutional right to privacy in memoranda he wrote in the 1980s. In one memo he referred to it as the "so-called" right to privacy. We all know that the constitutional right to privacy is the underpinning for the right to decide whether to have an abortion established in Roe v. Wade.  And what about Roe?  No "slim" record there. As Deputy Solicitor General, Roberts co-authored a brief directly challenging the validity of Roe. It said Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled and that it had no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution.