By Stephen Rohde, July 5, 2022

Editor’s Note: Below is the PDF dissent for you to read/download.

In one of the most important dissenting opinions in Supreme Court history, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan systematically refuted the arrogant, cruel and legally unsound majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eliminating a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

The masterful 60-page dissent, with extensive legal citations, deserves to be read by everyone who cares about the future of the United States’ constitutional democracy.

–from article

For the first time in American history, the conservative majority has rescinded a constitutional right and conferred it on the states where it may be regulated, abolished and criminalized.

–from article

For half a century, Roe v. Wade and later, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, “have protected the liberty and equality of women,” Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan wrote.

“Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that in the first stages of pregnancy, the government could not make that choice for women. The government could not control a woman’s body or the course of a woman’s life. It could not determine what the woman’s future would be. 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.”   

Source: ‘With Sorrow, We Dissent’: The Three Justices Who Rejected Dobbs – Ms. Magazine