WASHINGTON (CN) — The three justices who dissented last week from the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade came together for a full-throated indictment of their colleagues in the conservative supermajority.
“After today, young women will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had,” Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor wrote on Friday, taking the rare step of co-signing their opinion. “The majority accomplishes that result without so much as considering how women have relied on the right to choose or what it means to take that right away. The majority’s refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences of reversing Roe and Casey is a stunning indictment of its decision.”
Experts say the unusual co-dissent shows unity between the justices and emphasizes the extreme nature of the decision.
“It shows a really very unified agreement that they have to show that the appropriate way to understand the majority opinion is one that is radical, and there's really no division over that,” Caroline Fredrickson, a distinguished visitor from practice at Georgetown Law and senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, said in a phone interview.
Pointing both to Roe and Casey v. Planned Parenthood, a case that affirmed the former case in 1992, the dissenting justices said the choice of whether to bear a child is essential for women to control their own bodies and the course of their lives.
“Respecting a woman as an autonomous being, and granting her full equality, meant giving her substantial choice over this most personal and most consequential of all life decisions,” the justices wrote.
But even noting how fundamental this right was to women’s bodily autonomy, the dissenting justices say it was not absolute. The court created a balance between the rights of women and the rights of states to protect the “life of the fetus that may become a child.”
“Today, the Court discards that balance,” the justices wrote. “It says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of.”
The dissent aims to put into perspective the repercussions of overruling Roe. While the majority states that it is simply turning the issue over to state legislatures, the dissenting justices what this outcome truly means. They cite laws that would force women to carry their rapist’s child or that would require women to bear unsuccessful pregnancies. Pointing to statistics concerning the risks of pregnancy, the dissenting justices say American women are 14 times more likely to die carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion.
“What the dissent is trying to do is to humanize and contextualize the issue and say here are the people that it’s going to affect and here's why,” Frederick Lawrence, a distinguished lecturer at Georgetown Law, said in a phone interview.
Experts say it’s not only what the dissenting justices are saying that’s effective but how they are saying it. The dissent does this by appealing to emotion.
“With sorrow — for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection — we dissent,” Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayor wrote.
Part of what makes this appeal powerful, experts say, is its reluctance to give into anger.
“I think the three dissenters in Dobbs made a deliberate decision that the tone of their dissent was going to be sorrow, not anger,” Richard Bernstein, an appellate lawyer, said in a phone call. “I think that was very effective.
“These justices realize that anger is what motivates polarization and that an important part of their job is to oppose polarization," Bernstein continued. "Thus, they resisted the temptation to be angry. It was very impressive. It was equally unimpressive how angrily dismissive the majority opinions in Dobbs and Bruen were, as well as Justice Alito's concurrence in Bruen.”
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