The news today must be giving heartburn to the Republicans so loudly applauding the nomination of Joseph Alito, Jr. for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.According to the Christian Science Monitor, "of the four abortion cases in which he participated as an appeals court judge, he voted on the pro-choice side in all but one. The 1995 Alito vote in particular is raising eyebrows among some legal scholars." He also voted on several other cases:
- A 1991 case related to the Pennsylvania law requiring married women to notify their husbands before seeking an abortion. The court struck down the restriction. Alito dissented.
- A Pennsylvania law that required women seeking to use Medicaid funds to abort a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest to report the incident to law enforcement officials and identify the offender. Alito provided the decisive vote in 1995, striking down the abortion restriction.
- Alito ruled in 1997 that the Constitution does not afford protection to the unborn (re: a New Jersey law that prevents parents from suing for damages on behalf of the wrongful death of a fetus).
- In a 2000 challenge to New Jersey's ban on partial-birth abortions, Alito struck down the law based on a Supreme Court precedent.
In addition, the The Boston Globe's web site today reported on Alito from way back. . .in 1971, he chaired a Task Force at Princeton that stronglyurged gay rights, and came down solidly on the side of privacy rights. It quotes his writing:
''We are convinced that in recent years government has often used improper means to gather information about individuals who posed no threat either to their government or to their fellow citizens."
''The erosion of privacy, unlike war, economic bad times, or domestic unrest, does not jump to the citizen's attention . . . But by the time privacy is seriously compromised, it is too late to clamor for reform."
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