Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito told Ted Kennedy in 2005 that the legal basis for guaranteeing abortion rights was “settled” by law, a new book reveals

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote majority opinion this summer overturning the abortion rights case Roe v. Wadeassured the late Senator Ted Kennedy in 2005 that he believed the key legal basis for the Roe “settlement” was a new report reveals.

“I believe in precedent,” the conservative Alito told Kennedy, the liberal Democratic senator from Massachusetts wrote in his diary in November 2005. The New York Times reported.

“I believe there is a right to privacy. I think it’s regulated as part of the freedom clause of the 14th Amendment and the Fifth Amendment,” Alito said, according to Kennedy’s diary.

“So I recognize that there is a right to privacy. I believe in precedent. I think in Roe, that’s the most I can do,” Alito told Kennedy, a staunch abortion rights advocate who died in 2009.

The comment was made as Alito sought Senate confirmation from the Supreme Court, during a visit to Kennedy’s office, John Farrell wrote in The Times. Farrell’s new book, “Ted Kennedy: A Life,” detailing the diary entries, is published Tuesday.

The Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe established for the first time that there is a federal constitutional right to abortion.

Roe was based on an earlier high court decision, Griswold v. Connecticut, which found in 1965 that a constitutional right to marital privacy existed in a case involving married couples who were prohibited from using birth control.

For decades, conservatives have attacked Roe as flawed, in part by arguing that the Constitution does not expressly state an individual’s right to privacy, much less to abortion.

During his meeting with Alito, Kennedy was skeptical of the judge, who, as a lawyer at the Justice Department during the Reagan administration, had written a 1985 memo opposing Roe.

“Justice Alito assured Mr. Kennedy that he would not have to work much on the memo,” The Times reported.

“He was looking for a promotion and wrote what he thought his bosses wanted to hear. ‘I was a younger person,’ said Justice Alito. ‘I matured a lot.’ “

Alito also said his views on the flawed Roe decision were “personal,” according to Kennedy’s diary.

“It’s personal,” Alito said, Kennedy wrote in the diary. “But I have constitutional responsibilities and these will be the decisive positions.”

Despite this assurance, Kennedy voted against Alito’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Alito did not return a request sent to the Supreme Court press office seeking comment on The Times article.

In July, Alito wrote the majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe and another landmark abortion rights case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which was decided in 1992.

“Roe was dead wrong from the start,” Alito wrote.

“Its reasoning was extremely weak, and the decision had harmful consequences. And far from achieving a national solution to the abortion issue, Roe and Casey fueled debate and deepened divisions,” he wrote, noting that these cases “must be overruled .”

“The Constitution makes no mention of abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one now principally relied upon by proponents of Roe and Casey — the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” he wrote.

It was that amendment, the 14th, that Alito allegedly told Kennedy nearly 17 years earlier that established the right to privacy.

But Alito’s opinion in Dobbs said abortion is a “fundamentally different” right from those like “intimate sex, contraception, and marriage” because it “destroys … ‘fetal life.’

The Dobbs ruling meant that individual states would once again have the power to severely restrict or even ban abortion, or allow it with looser restrictions.

Abortion has been largely outlawed in at least 13 states since Dobbs was handed down.

Alito’s fellow conservative, Justice Clarence Thomas, agreed with Dobbswrote that the court’s other landmark rulings upholding gay rights and the right to contraception should be reconsidered now that Roe has been thrown out.

In his opinion, Thomas said those rulings were “demonstrably wrong decisions.”

The cases he cited are Griswold v. Connecticut; Lawrence v. Texas, which established the right to private sex in 2003; and the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that says there is a right to same-sex marriage.

Thomas noted that all of these decisions are based on interpretations of the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.

He wrote that the constitutional clause provides only a “procedure” for the deprivation of life, liberty or property, but cannot be used “to define the content of those rights.”