Roe Hangs in the Balance

Supreme Court nominee Samual Alito will replace the swing vote on abortion, and he is no friend to women. The 55-year-old Alito has served as a U.S. Court of Appeals Judge for the Third District for the last 15 years. So consistently conservative, Alito has been dubbed "Scalito" or "Scalia-lite" by some lawyers because his judicial philosophy invites comparisons to conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

In the early 1990s, Alito was the lone dissenter in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a case in which the 3rd Circuit struck down a Pennsylvania law that included a provision requiring women seeking abortions to notify their spouses.

"The Pennsylvania legislature could have rationally believed that some married women are initially inclined to obtain an abortion without their husbands' knowledge because of perceived problems - such as economic constraints, future plans or the husbands' previously expressed opposition - that may be obviated by discussion prior to the abortion," Alito wrote.

The case ended up at the Supreme Court where the justices, in a 6-3 decision struck down the spousal notification provision of the law. The late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist cited Alito's reasoning in his own dissent.

Do we really want to turn back the clock and return to the days of unsafe, back alley abortion? Do we want to be part of the generation that both won and lost the right to safe and legal abortion?

In 2004 more than 1.15 million women and men took to the streets in support of reproductive rights for women. It was the largest march in Washington, DC history. Everyone who attended that historic event must contact their Senators to demand that they oppose Samual Alito, or anyone who would restrict reproductive rights.