[Mb-civic] Alito's fantasy world - Kate Michelman - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Alito's fantasy world

By Kate Michelman  |  January 9, 2006  |   The Boston Globe

IN THE 1998 movie ''Pleasantville," Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon 
play typical '90s kids who are inadvertently transported into the unreal 
reality of a 1950s sitcom. They use their '90s values to teach the 
sitcom world some lessons about diversity and tolerance.

Today many people have a stylized, ''Pleasantville" vision of the 
pre-Roe era in which I grew up. They imagine fondly that almost all 
families had a Daddy at the office and a Mommy in the kitchen; that 
almost all family relations were well-ordered and unthreatening; in 
short, that life looked like ''Leave It to Beaver" -- and that, with a 
few legal adjustments, it could do so again.

The conservative movement has spent the last 20 years working to roll 
back social progress and make this fantasy a reality. It is time to stop 
seeing the fate of Roe as a Beltway parlor game. What really hangs in 
the balance in the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito are the 
fundamental rights to privacy, dignity, and autonomy -- rights that 
transcend partisan politics, shape the course of our daily lives, and 
lie at the heart of who we are as Americans.

Conservative ideologues are simply wrong about the 1950s. Fans of the 
decade seldom mention that, with women's autonomy and earning power 
severely limited, poverty was a constant threat. According to the Census 
Bureau, in those days almost 20 percent of American families lived in 
poverty, as did more than 40 percent of families headed by women -- in 
both cases, roughly double today's rates.

Doctors and social workers were reluctant to report child or spousal 
abuse, and many women died from unsafe abortions each year.

I know, for I grew up imagining a ''Leave It to Beaver" future for myself.

But when my husband abandoned our marriage, I fell overnight from 
stay-at-home mother of three to single pregnant welfare parent. To 
support my family, I faced hurdles I had never imagined: the difficult 
decision not to continue the pregnancy, the humiliating interview with a 
hospital board seeking to prove me ''unfit" to have a child in order to 
have a ''therapeutic" abortion and avoid the back alleys, and the 
requirement to seek the permission of the man who deserted me and my 
family. Still, I was fortunate -- many women in my situation had no 
choice but to seek illegal abortions, and too many died as a result.

We have traveled too far since then to even imagine a return to those 
conditions.

Samuel Alito's public record shows unequivocally that he is out of step 
with Americans on each of those fundamental issues -- that he has chosen 
to reside in a 1950s that never really was, rather than the new century 
in which the rest of us live.

He believes that the state needs to assist women in recognizing the 
moral dimensions of their decisions -- not only abortion but the forms 
of birth control, such as the Pill and the IUD, that are the most 
effective ways to prevent unwanted pregnancy. He sought to uphold 
abortion restrictions that would have treated a grown married woman no 
differently from a child, forcing her to notify her husband in all 
circumstances, including abuse and rape, before obtaining an abortion.

As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her decision overturning these 
restrictions, ''Women do not lose their constitutionally protected 
liberty when they marry." Judge Alito seems not to have grasped this 
fundamental fact of modern American life.

Alito seems as well not to think much of women's constitutionally 
protected right to equality in the workplace -- a right that women today 
take for granted.

He has repeatedly sought to limit women's right to fight employment 
discrimination in the courts, even in the most extreme cases, 
intervening where juries had already found in favor of a woman. He has 
opposed the affirmative action initiatives that opened the doors for a 
generation of women and minorities. He seems not to have believed women 
and minorities deserved equal access to his own educational institution, 
Princeton University.

Since the Constitution was framed, Americans have understood the right 
to privacy as fundamental to human dignity and freedom. Yet it appears 
that this is a core American value that Judge Alito does not share.

In December we learned of Judge Alito's low opinion of privacy rights 
for all Americans -- as exemplified by his eagerness to help the Reagan 
administration chip away at protections against government eavesdropping.

Today our privacy rights are under threat in arenas very far from the 
doctor's office. It is against this backdrop that women and men whose 
views on politics differ profoundly -- but who share the belief that 
part of the genius of the American way is its preservation of a personal 
sphere where government's writ cannot reach -- should view Judge Alito's 
nomination.

Senators should reach across party and ideological lines to reject the 
Alito nomination, not because we think he will vote to overturn Roe, but 
because we know he will not respect the dignity and autonomy that are a 
central part of what it means to be American -- for all of us.

Kate Michelman is former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America and 
author of the just published ''With Liberty and Justice for All: A Life 
Spent Protecting the Right to Choose."


http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/09/alitos_fantasy_world/
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