Samuel Alito -- Worth a fight?

I'm torn on this one. Alito is on record supporting legislation that requires a woman to inform her husband if she wants an abortion. The logic is other worldly, much as it was when the Supreme Court ruled a century ago in Plessy v. Ferguson that "separate but equal" facilities should not be viewed as reflecting badly on Negroes. Such a view was simply a misconception in the minds of non-whites.

By that reasoning, we could suppose that there's no real harm in expecting a woman to tell her husband that she wants an abortion. In some fantasy world, that may be true. In fact, many husbands were not educated at Princeton and Yale and would beat the crap out of their wives if they heard such a suggestion. Either a woman has a right to privacy and control of her body during the first trimester, or she doesn't. If she doesn't, then Roe v. Wade starts to look like a dead letter.

Of even greater concern to me, as a resident of Oregon, is the prospect of the court overturning Oregon's Right to Die legislation. You can argue that a woman who "needs" an abortion does so as a result of her own decision sometime earlier. You can't say the same about someone who is wasting away from colon cancer. There is no innocent third party. It's a straightforward question of whether the federal government can interfere in his end-of-life decision.

Alito deserves to a hearing. I'm going to be much more interested in his views on other privacy issues than just abortion.