Alito said to have worried over '91 abortion opinion
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
November 3, 2005
WASHINGTON – Judge Samuel Alito, President Bush's choice for the Supreme Court, told a pivotal Democrat that he had wrestled intensely with a 1991 opinion favoring an abortion restriction that has become a flash point in the debate over his confirmation.
Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., who sits on the Judiciary Committee, said that in a private meeting he had asked Alito about his dissent in the appeals court case Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The majority opinion in the case struck down a law requiring a married woman to notify her husband before having an abortion. Alito, in dissent, would have upheld that provision.
(snip)
Durbin's account of the conversation, which was not disputed by a spokesman for the White House, casts new light on Alito's thinking on an opinion that partisans on both sides of the abortion debate have seized as evidence that Alito would vote to narrow abortion rights.
Interest groups on both sides are mobilizing for a battle because Alito would succeed Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the swing vote on decisions about abortion and other social issues. Durbin, however, said Alito had told him that, rather than addressing the broader subject of abortion, he had struggled to interpret O'Connor's opinions about prohibiting an "undue burden" on a woman's right to have the procedure.
(snip)
Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051103/news_1n3alito.html