I say this because the Supreme Court, unfortunately, never actually recognized a women's right to terminate a pregnancy. Instead, what the Court did in 1973 in Roe v. Wade (and reaffirmed in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey) was to grant women permission to have abortions up to a judge-defined moment. (Such court permission-granting is not unique to abortion.)

A permission is obviously not a right; it is the opposite. Individual rights are commonly understood as principles that morally and legally protect activities that individuals by their nature are entitled to engage in free from aggression by others, even the people regarded as government officials. ("I know my rights!") Contractual rights are conditioned on the terms of the contract, but those are not the kind of rights we're talking about here.

Yes, the Roe and Casey opinions used rights language. And in their dissent in Dobbs, Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor write, "Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that the Constitution safeguards a woman's right to decide for herself whether to bear a child."

But we shouldn't be misled by that language because their dissent also states, in defending Roe and Casey, "Respecting a woman as an autonomous being, and granting her full equality, meant giving her substantial choice over this most personal and most consequential of all life decisions." (Emphasis added.) Not full choice — just "substantial choice." Why not full choice? Because, write the dissenters, "the State had, as Roe had held, an exceptionally significant interest in disallowing abortions in the later phase of a pregnancy." Permission granted; permission revoked.