President Bush kept his promise to appoint a Justice to the Supreme Court in the mold of Antonin Scalia when he nominated Samuel Alito, a federal court judge who wrote, "The Constitution does not protect the right to an abortion." It is difficult to see how these views could have been more clearly expressed by a judicial nominee.

Despite Alito's likely assertions of not legislating from the bench, his record should be a cause for concern. In response to prodding by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the White House has released documents that reveal the nominee as the architect of a legal strategy to chip away and eventually overturn Roe v. Wade. While serving as a lawyer in the Solicitor General's office, Alito wrote a memo to senior Reagan Administration officials in which he stated his desire to "advance the goals of bringing about the eventual overruling of Roe v. Wade and, in the meantime, mitigating its effects."

Alito's vision of "deconstitutionalizing" the right to choose has been coming to fruition for almost 20 years. Throughout the late 1980s and the 1990s, the Supreme Court has legitimated a number of state restrictions on abortion, but never to the extent of overruling Roe. While the landmark precedent has been battered and bruised, it has not yet been dismantled. In the wake of a series of cases that weakened Roe but still left its essential provisions intact, we can at least have some confidence that no state may pass a law that outlaws abortion where necessary to protect the woman's life or health. Alito's judicial decisions demonstrate that he is out of the mainstream on a woman's-health exception. But should Alito's vote replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's, American women may see what has been a fundamental right fall right off the Constitution and into the hands of the states.

Alito has argued that significant restrictions on a woman's right to choose are constitutional. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, his opinion upheld a law that required a married woman seeking an abortion to notify her husband. In this case Alito dissented because he would have gone further in restricting women's constitutional rights than even the draconian Pennsylvania law.

Alito would also uphold state laws that place significant roadblocks in the way of women seeking abortion care. He wrote in Casey that "time, delay, reduced availability, and forcing the woman to receive information she has not sought" might be burdensome for the woman, but could not "be characterized as an undue burden." The scope of his opinion practically guarantees that he would find no burden to be "undue."

There will be attempts to take the focus off of his record and his plain agenda and to train it instead on abstractions, on loose concepts of "judicial philosophy."

During the Alito hearings we will hear sanctimonious invocations of "judicial restraint," "strict construction of the Constitution," and "not legislating from the bench," just as we did with Chief Justice Roberts. We will hear Alito declare his fidelity, as did Roberts, to the "structure, text, and history of the Constitution." This is not an homage to the idea that judges should not govern us based on their personal idiosyncrasies or subjective agendas--the phrase is just packaging. If anyone really thought about the "structure, text, and history of the Constitution," they would realize that the "structure, text, and history" of the 1789 Constitution allow importation of slaves until 1808, count slaves as 3/5 of a person, restrict the vote to white male property owners--and say nothing about women.

Propaganda, slogans, and political cover are no substitute for a resume. Alito has been an architect of an anti-choice "rollback" strategy, and on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, he has translated his plans into action. He can be trusted to do exactly what he said he would like to do--overturn Roe. To believe that a Supreme Court appointment will have the talismanic effect of transforming a lifelong anti-choice lawyer and jurist into a blank slate is more than unwarranted faith -- it's downright naïve.

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Sumners is the executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri and a constitutional lawyer who has served as primary or amicus counsel in eight Supreme Court cases and is the author of a law textbook.