Eminent Domain

I spotted this on Confirm Them. Kate Michelman, former president of NARAL, fires off a pathetic attack on Judge Alito's dissent in Casey.

LOOKING BACK more than three decades to one of the most difficult times in my life, it's hard to say what seems more insulting: being forced to obtain my husband's permission to have an abortion after he had just abandoned my family or, many years later, Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s ruling that a similar requirement was not, in constitutional parlance, an "undue burden."

Wrong in the first sentence! A new record! Allow me to clear something up for Michelman.

per·mis·sion Pronunciation Key (pr-mshn)
n.

1. The act of permitting.
2. Consent, especially formal consent; authorization.

no·ti·fi·ca·tion Pronunciation Key (nt-f-kshn)
n.

1. The act or an instance of notifying.
2. Something, such as a letter, by which notice is given

Here we have two words. One of them is used by Michelman in this piece. One of them is part of the law in Casey. Notice that they mean two very different things. Can you figure this out? I hope so. I may e-mail the LA Times and try to get an address for Michelman. I have a dictionary that I'd like to mail to her.

And let's not forget this...

In 1969, in those distant but suddenly closer days before Roe vs. Wade, my husband deserted me and our three small daughters. After learning I was pregnant, and making the wrenchingly personal decision to have an abortion, I was forced to submit to an invasive and humiliating interrogation before a hospital review board in Pennsylvania. It ultimately gave its permission. I was in the hospital preparing for the procedure when a nurse informed me I would need my husband's permission too. I found him a few days later and he gave it.

Michelman is trying to compare the situation pre-Roe to Alito's view of Casey. I guess there was no exception for a husband who couldn't be found...

The woman has the option of providing an alternative signed statement certifying that her husband is not the man who impregnated her; that her husband could not be located; that the pregnancy is the result of spousal sexual assault which she reported; or that the woman believes that notifying her husband will cause him or someone else to inflict bodily injury upon her.

Whoops! I found one, and right there in the law too. Let's not let stupid things like facts get in the way of our passionate, melodramatic points, though.

According to an article on the front page of the Journal-Sentinel today, the liberal groups are ready to launch their attacks on Judge Alito this week. Nan Aron is quoted as saying, "Next week the press and American people will begin to hear a very different story." It's probably something from the fiction section.