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A federal judge has, in her comments, speculated that the 13th Amendment could provide a constitutional basis for a right to abortion, and now is facing backlash since her opinion runs “against the text, history, and case law” of the Constitution.
The Daily Caller News Foundation explained it was U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly who suggested that the “right” to abortion might be found in the 13th Amendment.
When the high court issued its Dobbs decision last year, overturning the faulty Roe v. Wade and erasing what had been purported to be a constitutional “right,” it cited the 14th Amendment.
The judge’s comments were “in the context of the ongoing case against pro-life activists indicted on FACE Act charges last March for allegedly creating a blockade that prevented access to a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic. In their motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction, attorneys for defendant Lauren Handy argue that the federal government no longer has an interest in protecting abortion rights, since Dobbs found such a right does not exist,” the report said.
Constitutional expert, legal commentator and congressional witness Jonathan Turley pointed out that Kollar-Kotelly “caused a bit of a stir.”
She “suggested that the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on involuntary servitude could be used to guarantee a women’s right to an abortion,” he explained.
She “stressed that the decision that there is no federal constitutional right to an abortion was based on the 14th Amendment, but was silent on the 13th Amendment or other grounds. The problem is that silence may be the most charitable response to this highly dubious theory, which has been bantered about in academic circles for years. The theory runs against the text, history, and case law of the Thirteenth Amendment,” he explained.
The judge claimed the 13th Amendment “has received substantial attention among scholars and, briefly, in one federal Court of Appeals decision” on whether it applies to abortion.
The claim is that: “Abortion prohibitions violate the amendment’s guarantee of personal liberty, because forced pregnancy and childbirth, by compelling the woman to serve the fetus, creates ‘that control by which the personal service of one man [sic] is disposed of or coerced for another’s benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude.'”
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Turley pointed out the judge claimed “it is entirely possible that the court might have held in Dobbs that some other provision of the Constitution provided a right to access reproductive services had that issue been raised.
