WASHINGTON — Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett signed a 2006 newspaper ad sponsored by an anti-abortion group in which she said she opposed “abortion on demand” and defended “the right to life from fertilization to the end of natural life.”
The ad, which had more than 1,200 names attached to it, appears to be the most direct expression of Barrett’s opposition to abortion and is sure to intensify debate that she would vote to restrict, if not overturn, abortion rights if she is confirmed to the Supreme Court.
President Donald Trump has nominated Barrett to take the seat of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an abortion rights supporter who died last month.
White House spokesperson Judd Deere said Barrett already has distinguished her personal views from her responsibility as a judge. “As Judge Barrett said on the day she was nominated, ‘A judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they might hold,'” Deere said in an email.
Barrett, meeting for a third day with senators on Capitol Hill, declined to comment when asked why she did not disclose the ad on her questionnaire.
She was meeting with Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo, who has pledged to support only nominees who acknowledge that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided. “How she will vote in the future on Roe, I don’t know,” Hawley said after the meeting.
Barrett was a professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School when she and her husband, Jesse, along with other people affiliated with Notre Dame, signed the brief statement sponsored by Right to Life of St. Joseph County, Ind. “We, the following citizens of Michiana, oppose abortion on demand and defend the right to life from fertilization to the end of natural life,” the ad in the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune read. “Please continue to pray to end abortion.”
The statement was part of a two-page spread that ran in conjunction with the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 that declared a nationwide, constitutional right to abortion. “It’s time to put an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade and restore laws that protect the lives of unborn children,” the other, unsigned page of the ad read.
Jackie Appleman, executive director of the anti-abortion group, declined to comment. The group is now known as Right to Life Michiana, encompassing parts of Indiana and Michigan.
Barrett’s name on the ad points in the same direction as her membership in Notre Dame’s “Faculty for Life” group and her name on a 2015 letter to Roman Catholic bishops affirming the “value of human life from conception to natural death.”
But she said about abortion in her 2017 questionnaire before her confirmation to the appeals court that “my views on this or any other question will have no bearing on the discharge of my duties as a judge.”
On the Senate floor, meanwhile, Democrats who know they can’t stop Barrett’s nomination continued Thursday to use Senate rules to delay and call attention to Republican states’ lawsuit, backed by the Trump administration, to strike down the Affordable Care Act. The court will hear the latest challenge to the law a week after the election, and if confirmed by then, Barrett could take part.
