Surprising no one in the wake of the leaked draft opinion, the Supreme Court today overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey and held that there is no constitutional right to elective abortion access. Some will celebrate that decision for returning one of the most contentious policy issues in American life to the legislative branch, while others will denounce it as a repudiation of personal autonomy and a further example of the judiciary’s historic failure to afford coequal legal status to women.
Cato did not file an amicus brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization because we believed—and continue to believe—that reasonable libertarians can disagree about whether the Constitution, properly understood, has anything to say about abortion and if so, what. In this post, we will explain why libertarian ideology does not supply a clear answer to the moral question of abortion, why the constitutional question is not as straightforward as absolutists on either side contend, and what lessons we can draw from the majority opinion in Dobbs.
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