Two of the people who gave me form were permanently and gravely injured by botched abortions.

My aunt was elderly when Roe v Wade was decided but told me why she supported the ruling.

In the depths of the depression she was a newly married woman who found that she was married to a bounder. Bill had no intention of keeping to his marriage vows and my aunt was struggling to keep her only two living children fed and clothed while he spent less and less time providing for his family. She needed the intermittent support her straying husband contributed to supplement what she could provide for them.

Bill caught a venereal disease in his wanderings (not uncommon) and, no treatment available, passed it on to his wife. Rather than bear more children who would likely be harmed by the disease, Annie found an abortionist and had the first abortion. No contraceptives were available to her, so there were others. Each one creating scars, physical and mental.

At the same time Annie told me about her abortions, my closest friend was leaving a similarly non-marriage marriage and working and attending college. She hoped eventually to get a job which could support her two year old daughter and herself. The law said that an abortion must be available to her. Another pregnancy and another child to support would keep her from leaving an abusive and disfunctional marriage and she chose to have an abortion. No such procedure was within reach of a desperately poor, uninsured working mother anywhere within a two-hundred-mile radius. Consequently no medically supervised abortion was available. She performed an abortion on herself, hemorrhaged, tore and scarred.

The nomination of Mr Alito to join the Supreme Court brings with it the reasoning which he has already propounded that there is in the married condition itself the right of any married man to be informed of any pregnancy his wife may be carrying and to have a say in the future of that pregnancy regardless of the decision of the wife to the contrary.

Even in instances where there are no basic disagreements between spouses about the future of a pregnancy, imposing legal barriers to a woman's full control of a her choices can and has caused abominable intrusion into the marriages of couples who are in complete agreement about the woman's right to that full measure of control. Legalisms just do not move as fast a life does.

Teddy G was taken to a hospital with a life-threatening hemorrhage . An ectopic pregnancy had burst through the wall of her Fallopian tube. As she faded between consciousness and unconsciousness her doctor explained that surgery was needed immedialtely to save her life. When Teddy urged the doctor to perform the surgery he explained that she wasn't able to consent to that surgery. Because the surgery would affect her ability to bear children, her husband would have to be located and consent to having his wife saved. The law which nearly cost my friend her life when it delayed treatment that she desperately needed was not necessary in the case of Teddy and her husband because they were in agreement that a decision which impacted her so severely would always have been left to her.

As has been said about democracy, leaving the choice to terminate a pregnancy always and solely in the hands of the mother is not ideal it's just that any other choice is so much worse.

In the whitehouse occupied by GW Bush and Dick Cheney, the Americans to whom loyalty is owed are not simply those who give their life's work over to serve their country. To have the your life work appreciated, you have to serve the policies and ideologies of the Bush and Cheney administration. Thus, you see the product of a lifetime of creating and managing intelligence resources for the protection of American lives destroyed by the muttered, leaked and sneaked campaign that Dick Cheney, I Lewis Libby and Karl Rove conducted to reveal the clandestine status of CIA employee Valerie Plame. Shattering a network of intelligence resources to warn the husband of the CIA agent who recruited and managed it to fall in line behind the administration's contention,(discredited) that the Iraq had WMD is a staggeringly arrogant act.

Our country's existence as a democracy depends on the ability of conflicting ideas to be heard. Dissent must always, in a democracy, test and inform the assertions of those in power. Any other system is something other than a democracy