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16 

JUNE MEDICAL SERVICES L. L. C. v. RUSSO 

THOMAS, J., dissenting 

at  152.  Without  any  legal  explanation,  the  Court  simply 
concluded that this unwritten right to privacy was “broad
enough to encompass a woman’s [abortion] decision.”  Id., 
at 153. 

B 
Roe is grievously wrong for many reasons, but the most 
fundamental is that its core holding—that the Constitution 
protects a woman’s right to abort her unborn child—finds 
no support in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment.  Roe 
suggests  that  the  Due  Process  Clause’s  reference  to  “lib-
erty”  could  provide  a  textual  basis  for  its  novel  privacy 
right.  Ibid.  But that Clause does not guarantee liberty qua 
liberty.  Rather, it expressly contemplates the deprivation
of  liberty  and  requires  only  that  such  deprivations  occur
through “due process of law.”  Amdt. 14, §1.  As I have pre-
viously  explained,  there  is  “ ‘considerable  historical  evi-
dence  support[ing]  the  position  that  “due  process  of  law” 
was [originally understood as] a separation-of-powers con-
cept . . . forbidding only deprivations not authorized by leg-
islation  or  common  law.’ ”    Johnson  v.  United  States,  576 
U. S.  591,  623  (2015)  (opinion  concurring  in  judgment) 
(quoting D. Currie, The Constitution in the Supreme Court: 
The First Hundred Years 1789–1888, p. 272 (1985)).  Oth-
ers claim that the original understanding of this Clause re-
quires that “statutes that purported to empower the other
branches to deprive persons of rights without adequate pro-
cedural guarantees [be] subject to judicial review.”  Chap-
man  &  McConnell,  Due  Process  as  Separation  of  Powers, 
121 Yale L. J. 1672, 1679 (2012).  But, whatever the precise
requirements of the Due Process Clause, “the notion that a 
constitutional  provision  that  guarantees  only  ‘process’  be-
fore a person is deprived of life, liberty, or property could
define  the  substance  of  those  rights  strains  credulity  for
even the most casual user of words.”  McDonald, 561 U. S., 
at 811 (opinion of THOMAS, J.).