The Research

In 2024, Sabadosa conducted initial research into the way bias plays a role in abortion-related decisions in the Supreme Court. After fifty years of Supreme Court decisions upholding the constitutional right to abortion, in 2022, the Dobbs decision reversed decades of judicial precedent on which state and federal laws relied. The only thing that had seemingly changed from when the Supreme Court had most recently reaffirmed Roe v. Wade (1973) in June Medical Services LLC v. Russo (2020) to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022) decision, was a new addition to the bench, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee selected from the list of justices Trump had promised would be reliably antiabortion votes. 

This quantitative research answers the question of whether Justices use ideological bias in their decision making and whether there is a statistically significant difference in the way that ideological bias presents itself in abortion-related cases compared to other types of cases where the same constitutional questions are at play. This repository includes all of the original data used in this research in order to allow for replication of this research and for future research into the Court.   

The research codes the ideological preferences expressed by Justices on seven different constitutional issues in all the abortion-related cases the Court heard from Griswold to Dobbs; those issues are equal protection, due process, privacy, state interest (10th amendment), stare decisis, fetal personhood, and 1st amendment issues. Using the Supreme Court Database, the research is then able to compare the Justices’ ideological position on these issues in abortion-related cases with their position on the same issues in all other cases. 

This analysis finds that Justices are more likely to vote along ideological lines in abortion-cases compared to other cases, irrespective of their ideology. Liberal justices have cast more liberal votes in abortion cases than in other cases that, for example, involve privacy. Of the thirty-two justices who have served on the bench between Griswold and Dobbs, only Justice O’Connor’s abortion votes show no real ideological difference than her votes in other cases. 

However, it is also important to note that this is juxtaposed with the fact that the Court, as a whole, has had a conservative majority almost consistently since 1973. The Court had a conservative majority when Roe was decided and a conservative majority when Dobbs was decided. The research suggests that the appointment of justices with changing attitudes toward precedent and increasing ideological inflexibility when it comes to abortion are the key factors that led to different outcomes in Roe, June, and Dobbs.