D.C. Judge Argues 13th Amendment Prohibiting Slavery May Provide Constitutional Right to Abortion

Ari Blaff
Tue, February 7, 2023 


Federal judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly proposed Monday that a constitutional right to abortion may be found in the 13th Amendment, an area she says was ignored by the Supreme Court when it overturned Roe v. Wade last June.

Weighing in on a case involving several anti-abortion advocates accused of blocking access to an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C., U.S. District Court Judge Kollar-Kotelly argued that the 13th Amendment outlawing “involuntary servitude” may guarantee the Constitutional right to abortion which the Court found did not exist in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

It “is entirely possible that the Court might have held in Dobbs that some other provision of the Constitution provided a right to access reproductive services had that issue been raised,” Kollar-Kotelly argued in a legal brief. “However, it was not raised.”

“The ‘issue’ before the Court in Dobbs was not whether any provision of the Constitution provided a right to abortion. Rather, the question before the Court in Dobbs was whether the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution provided such a right,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote.

The 13th Amendment was ratified at the end of the Civil War in 1865, outlining that neither “slavery nor involuntary servitude…shall exist within the United States.”

Kollar-Kotelly cited legal scholars such as Andrew Koppelman, author of Forced Labor: A Thirteenth Amendment Defense of Abortion, in making her case.

“Forced pregnancy’s violation of personal liberty is obvious,” Koppelman recently argued in The Hill. “Restrictions on abortion also violate the amendment’s guarantee of equality, because forcing women to be mothers makes them into (what so much tradition defined them as) a servant caste, a group that, by virtue of a status of birth, is held subject to a special duty to serve others and not themselves.”

Among the defendants in the case is Lauren Handy, founder of the organization Mercy Mission, known for protesting outside of abortion clinics. Because the group was arrested in March 2022, just months before the Supreme Court ruled that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion,” the defendants now insist the legal charges against them are no longer applicable.

“There is no longer a federal constitutional interest to protect, and Congress lacks jurisdiction,” Handy’s lawyers explained in a statement obtained by Politico. “The Dobbs court did not indicate that there is no longer a constitutional right to abortion; the court has made clear there never was.”

Kollar-Kotelly was appointed to the District Court for the District of Columbia in 1997 by President Bill Clinton. In 2017, Kollar-Kotelly blocked President Donald Trump’s order banning transgender people from serving in the military