Free Republic

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...

BOSTON — Case study one: a pregnant woman wants an abortion. Her husband doesn't. Should he have a say? Case study two: a woman wants to become pregnant with frozen embryos. Her ex-husband opposes the decision. Should he have a say? The answer, legally, is no in the abortion case, and in the case of frozen embryos, almost always yes. It might seem paradoxical, but it is emblematic of the way technology is changing the landscape of human reproduction. And it is the kind of paradox that could get more attention with the nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr....

Sitting through Wednesday’s pro-choice seminar gave me a headache. Luckily, I didn’t have to say anything during the Q&A session because I agreed with most of the information presented during the symposium. Facts are facts, and although researchers can skew data by bad sample populations and asking ambiguous questions, most nationally-accredited data is legitimate. Most of the issues regarding abortion are perceptual. One of the speakers and one of the members of the audience were at opposite ends of the abortion debate. But amusingly, the two agreed on the fact that around 20 percent of women who go through the...

When President Bush nominated Judge Sam Alito to the Supreme Court, it didn't take long for extremist groups to alight on his partial dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, decided by the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1991, as a pretext to oppose him. Planned Parenthood's Karen Pearl called the opinion "outrageous" and said it proved Judge Alito is "far, far out of the mainstream." Planned Parenthood mostly lost the Casey case, in which a three-judge panel unanimously upheld all but one of Pennsylvania's abortion restrictions. The next year, a 7-2 Supreme Court majority agreed. But by 5-4,...

Some of you already know that Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito is such a regular customer at a coffee shop near his office that they named a drink after him: Judge Alito's Bold Justice Blend. What you don't know is that married waitresses have to have their husbands' permission to wait on him. OK, I made that up. But Alito's 1991 ruling on a section of Pennsylvania's abortion law was nearly that repressive. He upheld the provision that required married women to notify their spouses before they could get an abortion. The two other judges on the three-judge federal panel...