Alito, spousal notification and the left

Charles Krauthammer goes after the "dishonest, disreputable and disgraceful ... charge, trumpeted by just about every liberal interest group, that Alito is so extreme and insensitive to women's needs that he supports spousal notification for abortion."

Alito, he argues, was merely following precedent when he ruled that spousal notification was constitutional.

Alito's Casey opinion no more tells you whether he "supports" the policy of spousal notification than whether he likes foie gras with his pudding. The only thing it tells you is that based on scrupulous parsing of Supreme Court precedents -- or more particularly, of Sandra Day O'Connor's precedents on permissible restrictions on abortion -- he concluded that spousal notification met the court's own standard for constitutionality.

The O'Connor standard was that the law could not impose an "undue burden." What did that mean? She spelled it out and set the bar pretty high. A state regulation that "may 'inhibit' abortions to some degree" was not enough to create an "undue burden." It required more. It required "absolute obstacles or severe limitations on the abortion decision."

So how to apply this test? Alito said: Let's see how the Supreme Court applied it. The court had found in previous decisions that there was no undue burden when you require a minor to notify or get consent from both parents, or to get judicial authorization. So surely, spousal notification, which is obviously less burdensome, was also constitutional.

Meanwhile, William Saletan complains that Alito treats women like girls.

Now, I'm seeing two arguments there. One is that the woman has some kind of misperception about her marriage or her situation, and her husband can set her straight. And the other argument is that the husband has such a profound interest in keeping the fetus alive—and his wife has such a small interest in controlling what happens to her body—that the government can force her to consult him even if she's so afraid of him, or so certain she can't have this baby, that she won't talk to him unless we threaten her with criminal charges. And you implied that Justice O'Connor, the justice you're planning to replace on this court, would agree with you.

As Krauthammer points out, though, a wife who has reason to fear her husband is not obligated to inform him.

[U]nder the Pennsylvania law I draw my example from, she could even forgo notification if she claimed that (1) he was not the father, (2) he could not be found, (3) he raped her or (4) she had reason to believe he might physically harm her. What prosecutor would subsequently dare try to prove to a jury that, say, she actually had no such fear of harm?

UPDATE: Why not spousal notification?