'It Required Courage': Alito Says Ending Federal Abortion Right Is Supreme Court's Leading Example of Bravery

Justice Samuel Alito has named the ruling that overturned Roe v Wade as the leading example of a Supreme Court decision that required courage.

Asked in a CBS News interview whether any decision had demanded particular courage, Alito pointed to Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, the 2022 case in which he authored the majority opinion holding that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.

CBS released clips of the interview, conducted by its chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford, on Friday 2 October 2026, with the full conversation due to air on Monday. The 76-year-old justice also said he had considered retiring and expects to revisit the question each year.

'We Didn't Know It When We Produced the Draft'

Alito said the decision demanded resolve from every justice who joined it. 'Well, the leading example is Dobbs. I think that required courage by all of the justices in the majority,' he said.

He tied that courage to the leak of his draft opinion, which Politico published on 2 May 2022, seven weeks before the ruling was issued on 24 June. 'It actually involved... we didn't know it at the time we produced the draft that was leaked, but it required courage to go ahead with that because of the implications,' he said.

The majority he referred to was narrower than the final vote suggests. The court ruled six votes to three in Mississippi's favour, but only five justices, Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, joined the opinion overruling Roe.

Chief Justice John Roberts concurred only in the judgment, writing that he would have taken a more measured course.

Lost Friendships and Threats

Alito described a personal cost. He said some cases had led to the loss of old friendships, and when Crawford asked whether he had lost friends over Dobbs, he answered: 'Yes.' 'That's something you have to live with,' he added.

He also warned about the climate around the court. Alito described physical threats and harassment directed at justices as something new in American society and quite disturbing, and criticised what he characterised as increasingly vitriolic attacks on the court's decisions by recent presidents of both parties, citing Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

He rejected the charge that the court acts politically. 'We are not part of any political movement. And we are not attempting to further any political agenda,' Alito said. 'We are trying to interpret the Constitution as best we can and apply it in cases that come before us.'

A Leak Still Unsolved and a Retirement Left Open

The leak remains officially unresolved. In a clip released by CBS, Alito indicated that he had a view on who was responsible but said the available evidence was not strong enough to identify anyone. The court's own investigation, published in January 2023, did not identify the person responsible.

His comments on retirement were open-ended. Alito said he had considered retiring at the end of the court's previous term but decided to stay, and expects to reconsider the question each year, while acknowledging that the political circumstances surrounding any future decision were difficult to predict.

His view of Roe long predates the ruling. As a Justice Department lawyer in 1985, Alito wrote a memo urging the Reagan administration to make clear that it disagreed with Roe and to seek an opportunity to argue that it should be overruled, while favouring an incremental strategy over a frontal assault.

Dobbs returned primary authority over abortion regulation to the states and the political branches, and the justice who authored it now describes it as the leading example of a case that required judicial courage.