With Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court, we'll all be hearing about his dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, otherwise known as the spousal notification case. I was all set to argue that requiring women to notify their spouses before they had an abortion was a good idea. After all, in Wisconsin, a spouse is notified when their partner applies for credit. Is an abortion really less important than that?

However, reading more about the Pennsylvania statute made me want to write about something else completely: how incredibly stupid and useless that law was in the first place. This is what our legislatures are busy doing?

To explain, the Pennsylvania law:

did not give the husband a veto power. Rather, a married woman simply had to certify (through her own uncorroborated and unnotarized statement) either that she had notified her husband, or that her case fell within any one of several statutory exceptions, including:

(1) [The husband] is not the father of the child, (2) he cannot be found after diligent effort, (3) the pregnancy is the result of a spousal sexual assault that has been reported to the authorities, or (4) [the woman seeking an abortion] has reason to believe that notification is likely to result in the infliction of bodily injury upon her.

As Judge Alito noted in his dissent:

the evidence showed that 1) most abortions are sought by unmarried women, and 2) about 95% of married women seeking abortions tell their husbands in any event. Of the small number of women remaining, the record was devoid of evidence as to what percentage would be unable to assert at least one of the four exceptions enumerated above. Nor was evidence offered to show what percentage of women would suffer retaliation from their husbands in ways not covered by the four exceptions.

So, according to Alito this statute certainly did not put an undue burden on women seeking abortions. But, I ask, who in the world was this law targeted at? As far as I can figure out, this law is targeted at women who are pregnant with their husband's baby who don't want to tell their husband about terminating the pregnancy but not because he's not the father or is abusive or because the child is the result of rape. So, basically, the law was targeted at women who are so deceitful and selfish that they'll terminate a pregnancy without letting the father, who by accounts has nothing wrong with him, know about it.

Did the law require these deceitful women to provide any evidence that they notified their husband? Of course not. Nope. The law would take them at their word. So, women that are prepared to have an abortion without their husband's knowledge are somehow supposed to be honest enough to tell the truth about notifying him. Yeah.

The legislature wasted their time on drafting a law that applies to virtually no one and has no teeth for the few people it does apply to. What was the point? Was it just a legislative attempt to put a chink into abortion rights? That's what I think. But is that the job of the Pennsylvania legislature? Should they be working for the people of Pennsylvania or working for the pro-life or pro-choice lobby?

We waste our time debating abortion. We villify good people for their stances on the issue. People have killed others over abortion. Roe v. Wade is bad law, but I almost wish it will be upheld forever because I'd just assume keep abortion on the backburner and spend our time as a nation on something else. Anything else.