The Utah Supreme Court, a body with a clear conservative majority, surprised many observers last week when it handed down a ruling blocking enforcement of the state’s new abortion ban, which criminalizes virtually all abortions from the moment of fertilization. The law, which was set to go into effect in 2022, was blocked by a trial court while the litigation continued, a decision affirmed by the state Supreme Court last week. The Utah decision is not just a reminder that conservative judges faced with the prospect of retention elections may be afraid to gut abortion rights; it also spotlights the chaos and confusion produced by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision undoing a right to choose abortion—and problems with using history and tradition as the only guide to identifying our most cherished rights.

Utah fought the lower court injunction by stressing the kind of argument the U.S. Supreme Court’s supermajority made in reversing Roe v. Wade: arguing that there could be no right to abortion rooted in Utah’s history and tradition because Utah law had long criminalized abortion, and that the rationale of the Dobbs ruling dismantling the federal right to abortion applied here at the state level. The judges of the Utah Supreme Court agreed that the state’s constitution should be interpreted as conservative judges often suggest—in line with “what constitutional language meant to Utahns when it entered the constitution.” But the fact that the state court........

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