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14  DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION 

BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., dissenting 

Roe’s and Casey’s different treatment of early and late abor-
tions.  Better, then, to move forward in time.  On the other 
side  of  1868,  the  majority  occasionally  notes  that  many
States barred abortion up to the time of Roe.  See ante, at 
24, 36.  That is convenient for the majority, but it is window 
dressing.  As the same majority (plus one) just informed us, 
“post-ratification adoption or acceptance of laws that are in-
consistent  with  the  original  meaning  of  the  constitutional 
text  obviously  cannot  overcome  or  alter  that  text.”  New 
York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc., 597 U. S., at ___–___ 
(slip op., at 27–28).  Had the pre-Roe liberalization of abor-
tion  laws  occurred  more  quickly  and  more  widely  in  the 
20th century, the majority would say (once again) that only
the ratifiers’ views are germane. 

The majority’s core legal postulate, then, is that we in the
21st century must read the Fourteenth Amendment just as
its ratifiers did.  And that is indeed what the majority em-
phasizes over and over again.  See ante, at 47 (“[T]he most
important historical fact [is] how the States regulated abor-
tion when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted”); see
also ante, at 5, 16, and n. 24, 23, 25, 28.  If the ratifiers did 
not understand something as central to freedom, then nei-
ther can we.  Or said more particularly: If those people did 
not understand reproductive rights as part of the guarantee
of  liberty  conferred  in  the  Fourteenth  Amendment,  then
those rights do not exist.

As an initial matter, note a mistake in the just preceding 
sentence.  We referred there to the “people” who ratified the 
Fourteenth  Amendment:  What  rights  did  those  “people” 
have in their heads at the time?  But, of course, “people” did
not ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.  Men did.  So it is 
perhaps  not  so  surprising  that  the  ratifiers  were  not  per-
fectly attuned to the importance of reproductive rights for 
women’s liberty, or for their capacity to participate as equal 
members of our Nation.  Indeed, the ratifiers—both in 1868 
and when the original Constitution was approved in 1788—