The pictures said it all.
First was the shot of the unflappable judge, serenely
gazing...waiting...hoping.that senator Joe Biden would finally get around to
asking his question. Then the unforgettable image of judge Alito's wife
Martha-Ann, gasping at the accusation that her husband was a closet
racist.
And at the end of it all, there was Teddie Kennedy, his contorted face
reduced to a helpless, choleric rage. Richard Durbin buried his brow in
his hands. And poor Dianne Feinstein - she looked like she had just
returned from a back-alley encounter with a pack of mating wildebeests.
Much of the Judiciary Committee's scrutiny revolved around Alito's views
on abortion, including his 1991 dissent in the now-famous Planned
Parenthood v. Casey case.
Predictably the "engaged and enraged" feminists had worked themselves
into a lather. Rep. Lynn Woolsey of California fumed that Alito's
position "takes us right back to the 1950s," and a hyperventilating
Louise Slaughter said that Alito had "argued that the state effectively
has the right to give a man control over his wife."
It may come as a surprise to many that Planned Parenthood used to be
against abortion. Back in 1963 they issued this warning: "An abortion
kills the life of a baby after it has begun. It is dangerous to your
life and health. It may make you sterile so that when you want a child
you cannot have it."
But along came Roe v. Wade in 1973, and Planned Parenthood decided to
milk the cash cow of abortion-on-demand. Eventually it realized that
state laws that placed restrictions on access to abortion were robbing
them of their market share. In Pennsylvania, the Planned Parenthood
chapter began to eye a 1982 law that required a pregnant woman to
"notify" her husband of her intention to abort.
Contrary to Rep. Louise Slaughter's rant, the spousal notification
requirement of the Pennsylvania law did not give the husband any kind of
veto power. In fact, the law didn't even require a woman to "plan" the
pregnancy with her spouse. It only required a simple notification, as
in, "Hey hon', I'm going to go out to have my nails done, pick up some
groceries, and maybe get an abortion."
But Planned Parenthood would not tolerate even that minimal concession
to the father's interest to keep his unborn child alive. So it sued to
overturn the law.
At the time, Samuel Alito happened to be one of three judges on the 3rd
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Two of the judges ruled that the spousal
notification requirement was not lawful, but Alito disagreed. He argued
the provision was "constitutional because it is 'rationally related' to
a 'legitimate' state interest."
As we know, the next year Planned Parenthood took the case to the
Supreme Court. In 1992, the Supreme Court affirmed that fathers had no
legitimate role in decisions to continue the lives of their own
offspring.
In retrospect, we have to ask how so many learned judges, most of them
fathers themselves, failed to discern a legitimate state interest in
respecting the bonds between biological dads and their children?
The 1992 Supreme Court ruling came just months after vice-president Dan
Quayle gave his famous Murphy Brown speech which deplored the fact that,
"Where there are no mature, responsible men around to teach boys how to
become good men, gangs serve in their place." The opinion followed a
decade of revelations by social scientist Sara McLanahan, who discovered
to her horror that fatherless children do far worse on a broad range of
social indicators.
One of the tragic results of the decision was that fathers were banished
from the abortion debate. From the Left, fathers were scorned as simply
irrelevant. On the Right they were reviled for their alleged hit-and-run
treatment of women, even though rape and incest accounted for less than
one percent of all abortions. The sad fact was, dads were now persona
non grata.
Planned Parenthood v. Casey amounted to the biological
disenfranchisement of dads and the radical de-legitimization of
fatherhood itself. For every beating heart snuffed out by Roe v. Wade,
Casey drove a stake through the heart of a proud father-to-be.
Judge Samuel Alito, whose confirmation is expected later this week, has
almost single-handedly deflated the Leftist hegemony over the spousal
notification debate. Now we can to begin to acknowledge the obvious: men
are grievously wounded when they are removed from the life-and-death
decisions affecting their own flesh and blood.
