Alito Assures Specter on Abortion View

By DAVID ESPO

WASHINGTON – Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, who expressed strong opposition to abortion rights two decades ago, pledged Friday that his personal views on the subject "would not be a factor" in his rulings, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said Alito had told him in a private meeting that "with respect to his personal views on a woman’s right to choose … that is not a matter to be considered in the deliberation on a constitutional issue of a woman’s right to choose. The judicial role is entirely different."

Specter, who supports abortion rights, said he was neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with what he had heard earlier in his office, and emphasized that he would question Alito vigorously about the issue at confirmation hearings scheduled to begin Jan. 9.

The sequence of events – the private meeting followed by Specter’s news conference – came after days of controversy sparked by 20-year-old documents in which Alito expressed his opposition to abortion in stark terms.

In one, a sort of job application, Alito wrote in 1985 that he did not believe abortion rights were provided by the Constitution. In the other, a legal memo released on Wednesday, he counseled other lawyers in the Justice Department on a strategy for chipping away at abortion rights, with the eventual goal of overturning a landmark 1973 ruling on the subject.