Ginsburg DOES NOT Agree With Alito on Abortion

In the fight to make Alito look like any other average judge, winger supporter's are (as usual) pulling out the stops; leaving out the qualifiers, distorting the history, repeating their manufactured "news" ad nauseum throughout the echo chamber (a reason why you dear reader, need to read more liberal blogs) and generally trying to sell the same old snake oil to Americans (i.e. "it's all the liberals fault" OR "liberals do it so why can't we").

Here's what Alito said about aboortion:

Most recently it has been an honor and source of personal satisfaction for me to serve in the office of the Solicitor General during President Reagan's administration and to help to advance legal positions in which I personally believe very strongly. I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect the right to an abortion.

This is what commentators and others, icluding Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the conservative American Center for Law and Justice, are claiming:

"Justice Ginsburg, by the way, leveled the same criticism regarding the underpinning of Roe v. Wade. She supports the right to abortion but recognized that it doesn't come out of the Constitution the way it was announced in Roe."

This is the truth from "Some Thoughts on Equality and Autonomy in Relation to Roe v. Wade," published in the January 1985 edition of the North Carolina Law Review, from a lecture of the same name by Ginsburg:

Professor Paul Freund explained where he thought the Court went astray in Roe, and I agree with his statement. The Court properly invalidated the Texas proscription, he indicated, because "[a] law that absolutely made criminal all kinds and forms of abortion could not stand up; it is not a reasonable accommodation of interests."

--snip--

If Roe had left off at that point and not adopted what Professor Freund called a "medical approach," physicians might have been less pleased with the decision, but the legislative trend might have continued in the direction in which it was headed in the early 1970s. "[S]ome of the bitter debate on the issue might have been averted," Professor Freund believed; "[t]he animus against the Court might at least have been diverted to the legislative halls." Overall, he thought that the Roe distinctions turning on trimesters and viability of the fetus illustrated a troublesome tendency of the modern Supreme Court under Chief Justices Burger and Warren "to specify by a kind of legislative code the one alternative pattern that will satisfy the Constitution."

I commented at the outset that I believe the Court presented an incomplete justification for its action. Academic criticism of Roe, charging the Court with reading its own values into the due process clause, might have been less pointed had the Court placed the woman alone, rather than the woman tied to her physician, at the center of its attention. Professor [Kenneth L.] Karst's commentary is indicative of the perspective not developed in the High Court's opinion: he solidly linked abortion prohibitions with discrimination against women. The issue in Roe, he wrote, deeply touched and concerned "women's position in society in relation to men."

--snip--

The conflict, however, is not simply one between a fetus' interests and a woman's interests, narrowly conceived, nor is the overriding issue state versus private control of a woman's body for a span of nine months. Also in the balance is a woman's autonomous charge of her full life's course ... her ability to stand in relation to man, society, and the state as an independent, self-sustaining, equal citizen.

And more from Media Matters, the ommissions replaced where wingers rip them out:

Elsewhere in the media, conservative commentators attempted to equate Alito's comments with those made by other legal scholars. In a November 15 column headlined "The Alito Fight Gets Interesting," New York Post columnist John Podhoretz claimed that Alito's 1985 assertion was entirely consistent with liberal scholar Edward Lazarus's criticism of Roe:

• So what if Edward Lazarus, one of the nation's foremost liberal Supreme Court journalists and a one-time clerk for the justice who wrote the Roe v. Wade decision, put it this way: "As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible."

But in quoting an October 2002 column penned by Lazurus, Podhoretz omitted the sentence that followed, in which Lazurus clarified that he believed the right to an abortion "has grounding" in the Constitution -- a position directly at odds with that put forth by Alito:

• As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose, as someone who believes such a right has grounding elsewhere in the Constitution instead of where Roe placed it, and as someone who loved Roe's author like a grandfather.

There are links to the left under STOP ALITO. Like I said before, get on those keyboards coz It's Hammertime!