Published July 10, 2018
I have to admit it: I was hoping President Trump would choose Judge Amy Coney Barrett. Brilliant, courageous, and quick on her feet, the professionally and personally esteemed mother of seven puts to rest — in her very person — the central pro-choice feminist assumption that bearing and raising children impedes women’s serious engagement in professional and public life.
She would have brought true diversity to the Court on the most rancorous constitutional issue of our day, underscoring how an intellectually astute woman need not acquiesce in the unquestioning abortion rights dogma that has held the cause for women’s rights hostage for far too long now. And she would have been able to make the case the best way possible: debunking the sham legal reasoning that has upheld the putative right for decades by day and blazing an alternative path with her family by night.
Comparatively, President Trump played it safe: Judge Brett Kavanaugh is a legal all-star, an accomplished jurist, and a darling of the conservative judicial establishment; he can be trusted by friend and foe alike to interpret the Constitution as it is written. A solid constitutionalist, Kavanaugh will join those on the Court who are deeply skeptical of its current (internationally extreme) abortion jurisprudence. But with Kavanaugh rather than Coney Barrett, the optics do not bode nearly as well.
Should the President have another chance, and should that chance come in the form of the retirement of an aged Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Trump should pull the trigger and nominate Coney Barrett. Our country desperately needs the opportunity to debate not only abortion, but to see how the autonomy feminism Ginsburg has long represented should pass away with its most cherished leader.
A dignitarian feminism, by contrast, would recognize both that women and men are of equal dignity and are duly encumbered by their shared responsibilities to the vulnerable and dependent — in their own families and in the community at large. Coney Barrett would not only serve the Constitution better than most jurists of our time; she would reveal, by the very integrity of her life, a more dignified way forward.
Erika Bachiochi is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School.
