As always, you can find the Dobbs v. Jackson decision here.

Paragraph 4 of 11

Sentence 3 of 4

There are a few tightly-bound claims in this sentence:

“But as we have seen, great common-law authorities like Bracton, Coke, Hale, and Blackstone all wrote that a post-quickening abortion was a crime—and a serious one at that.”

Here’s where we get into issues that annoy people who either want easy answers or have no time for thinking hard about things they feel deeply about. Get ready for some semantic parsing.

It is true that “Bracton, Coke, Hale, and Blackstone all wrote that a post-quickening abortion was a crime” (I’ll leave the “seriousness” issue aside for now). That has been established in previous sentences and their citations. What none of those writers did, though, was make the case as to why it was a crime. They just asserted that it was. In that sense, the Solicitor General (I’m referring now to sentence #108) is correct in claiming that none of those writers “firmly established” abortion at any stage as a crime. They just declared it so.

What we’re left with, if that holds, is a true claim that doesn’t actually address the claim it aims to refute. My project at the moment is to establish the truth of each claim in the sentences presented, so I’m calling these true:

• “[G]reat common-law authorities like Bracton, Coke, Hale, and Blackstone all wrote that a post-quickening abortion was a crime.”
• “[W]e have seen [that] great common-law authorities like Bracton, Coke, Hale, and Blackstone all wrote that a post-quickening abortion was a crime.”

And I’ll leave this undetermined:

• “But as we have seen, great common-law authorities like Bracton, Coke, Hale, and Blackstone all wrote that a post-quickening abortion was a [serious] crime.”