Dahlia Lithwick Discusses Amy Coney Barret and Roe V. Wade

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: I wonder if you could just weigh in there. Is there, you know, a mix of morality going on when it comes to using drugs that are derived from stem cells that pro-life, you know, candidates disapprove of? And the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett which is all about the pro-life agenda.

DAHLIA LITHWICK, SENIOR EDITOR, SLATE: Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It’s great to be here. And I think you’re exactly right. I think you can’t say, you know, what is sauce for the goose isn’t sauce for the gander if you are opposed to all of the stem cell research. If you say, fundamentally, this is immoral, then you can’t turn around and reap the benefits of using it as medicine when you’re in a crunch. I will say, I just think we get very, very, very knocked off course, Christiane, when we start talking about infanticide and late term abortions. I mean, I think we have to be really, really focused on what the terms of this conversations are. Infanticide is not part of this conversation.

AMANPOUR: Well, indeed, the majority of Americans, as I’ve said, approve of upholding Roe but with some restrictions. So, I think that’s also interesting as well. But I want to ask you because Jessica Anderson spoke over and over again about this concept of originalism. Can you tell us what she means precisely in relation to this nominee and at questions that she’s being asked?

LITHWICK: Yes. Originalism is a method of constitutional interpretation. It’s a toolbox. It was probably most famously embodied by Justice Antonin Scalia. That’s Amy Coney Barrett’s mentor. She clerked for him. And I think there’s different flavors of it, but the flavor that Judge Barrett says she subscribes to is this notion that when you look at either a constitutional provision or statutory provision, you go back and you try to figure out what was the original public meaning that the drafter had in mind. In other words, you don’t triangulate forward into the future. You don’t necessarily look at present circumstances. You are very much bound by the actual language of the statute or the provision, whatever the drafters thought it meant is what it means, and that means sometimes looking in dictionaries, contemporaneous dictionaries, but it’s a way of saying, I’m constrained by the language of the law.