'Dangerously Radical'
Besides, many of us think he was right to defer to the legislature on this issue. Spousal notification passed easily in Pennsylvania because so many legislators concluded that men have an interest in their unborn children and should at least know about the decision to abort, and thus have the chance to talk their wives out of it. Husbands should be allowed to express how losing a child would affect them. Mainstream America clearly agrees with this view. Support for spousal notification is overwhelming. It has hovered between 63 and 72 percent for many years.
Last month Pew Research reported that "large majorities favor such measures as mandatory waiting periods, parental and spousal notification, and a prohibition on late-term abortions." Gallup (1996) reported that majorities back mandatory spousal notification in nearly every subgroup surveyed, including Democrats (66 percent), liberals (60 percent), and young people (75 percent of those 18 to 29). It is indeed peculiar that a campaign to depict Alito as out of the mainstream should focus so sharply on a plausible technical analysis of a law the mainstream clearly backs.
It may be that the hard feminist left has no real ammunition to fire at Alito and must make do by inflating the importance of a debatable notification case. It isn't much, but it seems to be all they have.
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