Krauthammer has a very excellent thirteenth century mind and I collect a lot of his columns for historical reasons. He once did a film review which praised a film for not having sex because it didn't have any women. Women in a movie = sex, see?
Now he has deigned to explain to us why Alito's argument about spousal notification in abortion cases doesn't smack at all of condescending towards women as property of men or as minor children:
Pop quiz: Which of the following abortion regulations is more restrictive, more burdensome, more likely to lead more women to forgo abortion?
(a) Requiring a minor to get the informed consent of her parents, or to get a judge to approve the abortion.
(b) Requiring a married woman to sign a form saying that she notified her husband.
Can any reasonable person have any doubt? A minor is intrinsically far more subject to the whims, anger, punishment, economic control and retribution of a parent. And the minor is required to get both parents involved in the process and to get them to agree to the abortion.
The married woman just has to inform her husband. Even less than that. She just has to sign a form saying that she informed him. No one checks. Moreover, under 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?
Remember: The question is not whether (a) or (b) is the wiser restriction. The only relevant question is which is more likely to discourage the woman from getting an abortion.
The answer is obvious.
Why is this the relevant question? Because when, in 1991, Judge Samuel Alito was asked to rule in Planned Parenthood v. Cas ey on the constitutionality of Pennsylvania's spousal notification requirement, Supreme Court precedents on abortion had held that "two-parent consent requirements" for a juvenile with "a judicial bypass option" do not constitute an "undue burden" and thus were constitutional. By any logic, therefore, spousal notification, which is far less burdensome, must also be constitutional -- based not on Alito's own preferences but on the Supreme Court's own precedents.
The situation of a married woman = the situation of a minor child, see?
"To krauthammer" should from hereon be a verb denoting the equaling of two totally unlike options to prove the angelic quality of any wingnut in trouble. And yes, Krauthammer is a sexist.