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

Paragraph 11 of 11

Sentence 1 of 2

The next sentence has three claims:

“One may disagree with this belief (and our decision is not based on any view about when a State should regard prenatal life as having rights or legally cognizable interests), but even Roe and Casey did not question the good faith of abortion opponents. See, e.g., Casey, 505 U. S., at 850 (‘Men and women of good conscience can disagree . . . about the profound moral and spiritual implications of terminating a pregnancy even in its earliest stage’).”

The claims:

• “One may disagree with this belief.”
• “[O]ur decision is not based on any view about when a State should regard prenatal life as having rights or legally cognizable interests.”
• “[E]ven Roe and Casey did not question the good faith of abortion opponents.”

The first claim is obviously true. Millions of people disagree with that belief, so of course they may. If someone wants to challenge that, I’m open to the conversation, but I can’t imagine someone seriously disagreeing with this claim.

I have issues with the second claim. It might be true that the Dobbs Court doesn’t spend any time trying to establish (or even really investigate) “when a State should regard prenatal life as having rights or legally cognizable interests,” but the Dobbs decision relies on assuming certain things about that matter. This point is central to the decision and the Court just steps around taking ownership of it.

The third claim seems true, even just reading the quote that accompanies the citation. But let’s look at the citation:

“Men and women of good conscience can disagree, and we suppose some always shall disagree, about the profound moral and spiritual implications of terminating a pregnancy, even in its earliest stage. Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that cannot control our decision. Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code. The underlying constitutional issue is whether the State can resolve these philosophic questions in such a definitive way that a woman lacks all choice in the matter, except perhaps in those rare circumstances in which the pregnancy is itself a danger to her own life or health, or is the result of rape or incest.”

That quote appears in Casey—that much is true. It may seem a minor point, but that doesn’t validate the claim. It doesn’t address Roe, and even if the Court provided a Roe quote agreeing with the Casey quote, that doesn’t establish that “Roe and Casey did not question the good faith of abortion opponents.” That’s just the usual challenge of demonstrating the truth of a negative.

That leaves us with one true claim:

• “One may disagree with this belief.”

And two undetermined claims:

• “[O]ur decision is not based on any view about when a State should regard prenatal life as having rights or legally cognizable interests.”
• “[E]ven Roe and Casey did not question the good faith of abortion opponents.”