Chief Justice John Roberts says Supreme Court went too far in taking 'the dramatic step' of overturning Roe v. Wade

• Chief Justice John Roberts says the Supreme Court shouldn't have overturned Roe v. Wade.
• Roberts argues that the court's conservatives went too far in ending the guarantee of a federal abortion right.

Chief Justice John Roberts made it abundantly clear that he felt the Supreme Court's five other conservatives went too far in their decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and end a federal right to an abortion on Friday.

"The Court's decision to overrule Roe and Casey is a serious jolt to the legal system—regardless of how you view
those cases," Roberts wrote in his concurring opinion that was released on Friday along with the majority opinion. "A narrower decision rejecting the misguided viability line would be markedly less unsettling, and nothing more is needed to decide this case."

Roberts' view though became largely moot in the face of the united bloc of other Republican-appointed justices, including former President Donald Trump's three picks, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Alito wrote the Court's majority opinion that overturned 50 years of precedent that reaffirmed a limited right to privacy that protected a right to abortion. Like in his leaked draft opinion, Alito torched the landmark decision in Roe.

"Roe was egregiously wrong from the start," Alito wrote. "Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division."

Roberts has long cut a reputation as a justice who would prefer that the court more directly address the questions before it as opposed to authoring sweeping opinions that go down in the history books. It has long been thought that this principle animated his decision to preserve the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, better known as Obamacare in the 2012 ruling that protected President Barack Obama's signature domestic achievement.

Roberts makes clear in his concurring opinion that he would have upheld Mississippi's near-complete ban of abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, but he repeatedly stresses that overturning Roe and 1992's Planned Parenthood v. Casey will have profound effects. Roberts called such an action a "dramatic step" that Mississippi itself did not want the Court to take. (The state changed its view of the case after Barrett was confirmed to the court.)

"Both the Court's opinion and the dissent display a relentless freedom from doubt on the legal issue that I cannot share," Roberts wrote. "I am not sure, for example, that a ban on terminating a pregnancy from the moment of conception must be treated the same under the Constitution as a ban after fifteen weeks."

Roberts' preferred decision would still have significantly curtailed abortion rights. Upholding Mississippi's law without overturning Roe would have limited the concept of fetal viability that the court made the center of its ruling in Casey. No defender of abortion rights, Roberts says he agrees that the court erred in its original 1973 decision in Roe. But he stresses that justices did not need to gut the decision "all the way down to the studs."