Justice Anthony Kennedy considered quitting the Supreme Court over abortion.

Kennedy, who served from 1988 to 2018, makes the revelation in a new book as he explains how he balanced his Catholic faith and ultimately cast the deciding vote in 1992 that saved abortion rights for the next three decades.

His writings and a recent book by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative Catholic who provided the key vote in 2022 to end a constitutional right to obtain an abortion, provide a rare window into personal conflicts regarding religion and the law.

Catholics have increasingly dominated the high court and prompted debate over how the justices’ faith influences their decisions. The books arrive at a larger moment in America as Christian nationalism appears to be growing and debate over faith and politics has escalated.

“Because of my ever-constant belief that life must be protected from the moment of conception,” Kennedy wrote in his book to be published on October 14, “I struggled with the idea that the Constitution should allow some choice to end a pregnancy.”

Kennedy says he was particularly torn during the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when the justices were deciding whether to affirm or reverse Roe v. Wade, the milestone that made abortion legal nationwide.

“The struggle led me to wonder whether it would be wrong for me, morally, to stay on the Court if doing so would require me to rule under the law that women have the right to end a pregnancy in its early, pre-viability stage,” Kennedy writes. “My conclusion, reached in private and without discussion with others, was to stay on the Court.”

Today’s Supreme Court, controlled by justices more solidly conservative than Kennedy, has permitted greater mixing of church and state, through a coach’s prayers at public school football games, government financing of sectarian educa