Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor called the reversal of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision a “staggering possibility,” not just for the pro-life movement, but for all Americans.
“Because that violence of abortion really has cost us 60 million plus American lives,” O’Connor told Breitbart News Saturday host and Washington, DC, Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle.
In May, an unknown source leaked a Supreme Court draft opinion related to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case centered around Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, and the most significant challenge to Roe v. Wade in decades. The leaked draft indicates the court could overturn its Roe v. Wade decision declaring abortion a protected right under the United States Constitution. Boyle noted that the Supreme Court’s official decision could come out as soon as next week.
If the Supreme Court finds there is no right to abortion in the Constitution, “that will then turn the decision back to the people and their elected state legislatures,” O’Connor said, adding that abortion has been a “national sin” before and since the 1973 ruling.
“It was a ridiculous decision. It was not a scholarly legal opinion. It was a political popularity contest,” he said.
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“We’ve got to keep going until we’ve determined that abortion is the taking of a life and is not legal in America,” O’Connor continued. “And you know what, I think we can find other solutions that don’t involve the taking of a life in a crisis pregnancy.”
O’Connor recounted how Roe v. Wade was handed down, saying it all started over whether banning contraceptives violated individuals’ right to privacy.
“And so then privacy grew to mean the right of the woman over her own body. What the U.S. Supreme Court failed to do — they said that the unborn child is human and the unborn child is alive, but the Constitution only protects persons. So they did some parsing of words…they played lawyer to the extreme and said that an alive human in the mother’s womb is not a person,” he said.
O’Connor continued:
And it’s flawed because even in our U.S. environmental laws, if the law regarding endangered species is protecting a minnow, then the egg of that minnow is protected to the same degree that a mature adult minnow is protected.
Also in our criminal law in the U.S., if you run a red light and you hit a lady in a van and she’s pregnant, you can be charged with two manslaughters. So really, they had to play a massive game of mental twister to treat the child in utero different from endangered animal species and different from an entire body of criminal law.
O’Connor said former President Donald Trump’s nomination of conservative-leaning justices is a “great accomplishment of his presidency” and largely to credit for the potential ruling.
“So the center of gravity of the Supreme Court changed from liberal to more of a strict construction view of the Constitution and of the role of the court,” he said. “We shouldn’t have the Supreme Court making policy in the country. They’re supposed to construe laws. The policies are supposed to be embedded in laws by our legislature.”
O’Connor is running for reelection and will face off against his competitors in Oklahoma’s June 28 primary elections. The attorney general is backed by pro-life groups, including the National Right to Life and Susan B. Anthony List.
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. Eastern.
